All the disciplines, as well as inter-/trans-disciplinary research, have their own core questions and concepts. For example, political science addresses the nature of power and analyzes its traits at a particular time and space by observing the political arena. Sociology questions the nature of society or connection/disconnection between people and argues for changing/unchanging characteristics by analyzing social groups, including the family, religious groups, ethnic groups, and so on. Asian Studies is no exception, supposedly.
The book Framing Asian Studies addresses one of the core questions of Asian studies: that is, “What is Asia?” As the scope, nature, and perceived significance of Asia have not been fixed, but rather changed over time, Asian Studies scholars have struggled to define their mission. Because of the difficulty of sharing a core mission, Asian Studies has developed its own frames, research questions, and methodologies in different areas and times, which, in turn, make it difficult for Asian Studies scholars to share common answers and approaches to the core question of “What is Asia?” This book was designed and published in just such intellectual circumstances.
The book is composed of four sections and twelve chapters that were originally presented as conference papers (except Chapter 1). According to the explanation by the editors in the Introduction (Chapter 1), the conference “Framing Asian Studies: Geopolitics, Institutions and Networks” was held in the Netherlands in 2013, and eleven papers presented there were selected for this book for their “potential to make sharp points or to raise critical questions about the interplay of geopolitics, institutions and scholarly networks in framing the outlook of knowledge about Asia” (p. 7). In fact, the book has a subtitle, “Geopolitics and Institutions,” based on the editors’ assumption that the answers and approaches to the core question of Asian Studies have been formed and guided by the geopolitics of the venues where researchers are doing research on Asia as well as institutions (foundations, associations, institutes, and so on) where researchers are doing their own research.
As the Introduction (pp. 7–16) explains the structure of the book as well as the concrete arguments in each chapter, the reviewer will not simply repeat a summary of the contents. Rather, it would be more fruitful to point out the contributions of the book as well as some untouched points that this book should have addressed.
One of the biggest contributions of this book is that it successfully illustrates “local conditions” in which knowledge about Asia has been created. Though not fully compared, we can easily understand how differently European, American, Australian, and Indian intellectuals looked at Asia by reading Chapters 2, 3, and 10. Chapter 6 touches on French and American scholarship to compare how these two frame the Cambodian “genocide” in different forms, which resulted in different views on the resettlement of Cambodian refugees. Chapter 12 focuses on Chinese studies in Japan and South Korea, indicating how different geopolitical as well as local factors produced knowledge about China in the two countries. Moreover, Chapters 8 and 9 cover Asian studies in the post-socialist countries of Russia and Lithuania, which have different geopolitical commitments to Asia. Such wide coverage of the countries in which Asian Studies has developed is definitely the unique and unparalleled contribution of this book.
The second contribution of this book is its historical account of knowledge creation on Asia. Along with the above-mentioned chapters, almost all the chapters focus on concrete terminologies or categories in Asian Studies to see how they are formed in historical contexts. Chapter 4 looks at maps on the covers of books and journals as well as in the logos of professional associations of Asian Studies to illustrate how “Asia” and “South Asia” have been framed under “geopolitical, strategic and security considerations” (p. 89) over time. Chapter 5 sees changing accounts of Javanese religion during the Cold War (1950–1970), during and after the New Order (1970–2000), and during the War on Terror (2001–2013) by critically analyzing epoch-making books on Javanese religion. Chapter 11 tries to compare two different systems on the classification of the Chinese in Singapore at different times to identify different approaches by British and Japanese colonizers. All these chapters take a social constructivist approach which pays close attention to the historical process of social events including the creation of social knowledge on Asia. It is this common methodological approach that guarantees the cohesiveness of the arguments in this book regardless of their diverse topics and the regions they deal with.
The third contribution of this book, though perhaps not consciously intended, is its attention to the dynamic relations between the observers and the observed in Asian Studies. Chapter 7 picks up the case of Taiwan Studies in which “the main motivation and impetus for the exogenous study of the field stems from the local” (p. 156).
On reflection, “Asia” used to be regarded as just an object to be observed, but “Asia” now is emerging as an agent that promotes its own study, which eventually changes people's understanding of Asia. Not only Taiwan, but also China, South Korea, and Japan are all proactive in promoting research on their politics, economics, society, and culture in other countries than their own, including their various neighboring countries in Asia, through financial support, networking, and provision of information at Confucius Institutes, the Korea Foundation, and the Japan Foundation respectively. Needless to say, these institutions are now indispensable institutions for the promotion of Asian Studies; that, however, is not fully discussed in this book.
Another point that the reviewer regrets is that the book lacks any reference to “Asian Studies before Asian Studies.” Though the book refers to European (and Japanese) colonial interests in Asia (especially in Chapters 2 and 11), most of the chapters in this book seem to make the assumption that Asian Studies is the product of the Cold War, which is not necessarily the case, in this reviewer's opinion. For example, Japan has a rich history of Asian Studies before World War II, which was driven by geopolitical considerations in some institutions, including the Institute of Oriental Culture (established in 1941, now having changed its name to the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia) at the University of Tokyo, to which the reviewer is affiliated.
The same can be said to be the case of Chinese scholarship on Asia. The end of World War II in Japan as well as the end of the Civil War in China created an intellectual discrepancy before and after the wars; this makes it difficult for outside observers to have a closer look at the continuity/discontinuity in the intellectual tradition of Asian Studies.
The cause of this neglect of pre-war traditions can be partially attributed to the fact that Japanese scholars and Chinese scholars who were trained in their local academic communities were not invited to take part in this book (or perhaps did not respond to the call for papers at the very beginning), but mainly because this book project started from the doctoral dissertation of one of its three editors, “Framing Sociology in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore: Geopolitics, States and Practitioners,” in which Dr Tzeng dealt with the development of sociology in these three societies as a spreading process of sociology as a Western discipline during the Cold War period. As long as these “three little tigers” are analyzed, it is acceptable to set the beginning of the Cold War as a starting point for the argument (it would be arguable, however, whether there is any pre-war history of sociology in Taiwan), but once Japan and China, which have a long tradition of their own “Asian Studies,” are included in the argument, we would have a much deeper understanding of how geopolitics and institutions have played a variety of roles in shaping Asian Studies in Asia. For instance, Marxism in Japan and China heavily influenced social scientists in pre-war Japan and China, eventually producing a complicated constellation of understanding of Asia in these two countries.
The reviewer greatly appreciates the editors’ painstaking efforts to bring together many different countries’ experts on Asian Studies (especially those from post-socialist countries, which are often forgotten in Asian Studies) to discuss core issues of Asian Studies through the publication of this book. Probably, though, the next book project ought to have a focus on the dialogue between “Asian Studies before Asian Studies” and “Asian Studies after Asian Studies” to enable a better understanding of the future direction of Asian Studies at a time when we are witnessing the “Asianization of Asian Studies.”
