C omm unal/P lural, Vol. 8, N o.

1, 2000

Anti-Area Studies
T ESSA M O RR IS -S U ZU KI

The recent resurgence of various form s of popular nationalism and ethnocentrism in

Australia and elsewhere raises questions about the im pact which area studies have had in
prom oting international understanding. In the contem porary context of globalisation, it
could be argued that the spatial fram ework of area studies is at tim es an obstacle rather than
a help to understanding the world we live in. By reviewing the em ergence of area studies
and exploring the spatial concepts em bodied in the area studies approach, this article seeks
to assess som e of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and to sketch out the
possibility of an alternative `anti-area studies’ agenda for future research.

K eywords: area studies; civilisation; culture; A ustralia ; Japan

W riting 50 years ago, as area studies cam e into its own in the USA , anthropologist
Julian Steward proclaim ed that there was `general agreem ent’ about four key
objectives of this new ® eld of research. The four objectives, wrote Steward, were to
`provide knowledge of practical value about im portant world areas’ ; to `give students
and scholars an awareness of cultural relativity’ ; to `provide an understanding of
social and cultural wholes as they exist in areas’ ; and to `further the developm ent of
a universal social science’ (Steward 19 50 : 2). Elaborating on his them e, Steward
pointed out that `any one who becom es fam iliar with a new and different culture
experiences what has been called a ª cultural shockº Ð an aw areness that everything
in the new culture is som ehow unfam iliar but is also part of a self-consistent and
intelligible whole’ . By understanding that each unfam iliar culture had such a
`self-consistent and distinctive pattern’ , the student would com e to appreciate that
`none is absolute or inherently superior to the others’ . This understanding, Steward
continued, `gives the laym an greater tolerance of the peoples of the other areas, and
it gives the scholar an objectivity which will help him avoid the m ethodological
fallacy of ethnocentrism ’ (Steward 195 0: 4).
Re-reading those words half a century on, several thoughts spring to m ind. O ne
is that `cultural shock’ no longer seem s to be the exclusive preserve of area scholars
who journey to distant regions. Rather, it has becom e a regular part of daily life. In
a world of global ¯ ows, unfam iliarit y presses in from every side, but, far from being
part of a `self-consistent and intelligible whole’ , this unfam iliarit y is overwhelm ing
experienced as unintelligible in term s of conventional notions of region, area and
space. International frontiers becom e at once m ore porous and m ore ferociously
guarded, while new internal frontiers, often patrolled by the invisible but all-seeing

1320-7873 print/1469-3607 online/00/010009 -15 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

10 T. Morris-Suzuki

eye of the surveillance cam era, divide islands of glittering wealth from seas of urban
decay. Transport and com m unications technologies increasingly detach tem poral
from spatial proxim ity, m aking the centres of the great world cities closer to one
another in term s of travel-tim e, consciousness and culture than they are to their own
rural hinterlands. It has becom e com m onplace to speak not of the end of history but
of the end of geography.
A related thought is that the contem porary encounter with the unfam iliar has
am bivalent im plications for the prom otion of `tolerance’ or the conquest of ethno-
centrism . On the one hand, old certainties about national, ethnic or cultural
belonging are constantly exposed to challenges. But on the other, a rather com m on
response to the unintelligibility of the world is precisely an attem pt to re-establish
these certainties by reasserting the power of national boundaries and patriotic
sym bols. The in¯ uence of globally resurgent nationalism s in the 19 90 s can be seen
not only in the appearance of certain new form s of right-wing politics, but also
(m ore alarm ingly, perhaps) in the popularity of m ass-consum ption chauvinism . A s
an A ustralia n scholar working m ostly on Japan, I am repeatedly intrigued but
alarm ed both by striking sim ilarities in the rhetoric of Japanese and A ustralian
popular nationalism in Australia and Japan, and by the way in which nationalist fears
and stereotypes in different countries seem to feed off each other, creating a
continuing spiral of incom prehension.

Popular Nationalism in Japan and Australia

Consider, for exam ple, two of the best-sellers of 19 98 : the 38 4 page com ic book On
W ar [Sensoron], by Japanese m anga writer K obayashi Yoshinori, and A ustralian
journalist Paul Sheehan’ s Am ong the Ba rbarians. In som e respects, these are two very
different books. On War, which was the num ber two best-seller in Japan in 19 98, is
a bizarre am algam of 199 0s pop culture and unreconstructed 193 0s ultra-
nationalism . Its hero, as in all of K obayashi’ s m any best-selling com ics, is the author
him selfÐ or rather, an eternally young version of the author (who is now m iddle-
aged and rather paunchy). Striding fearlessly through the pages of his own com ic,
and swapping his m ufti en route for an array of fetching m ilitary uniform s, this Peter
Pan Kobayashi does battle with the politically correct `oldies’ [oyaji] of the Japanese
intellectual establishm ent, to whose lack of patriotism he attributes Japan’ s current
econom ic and social decay (Kobayashi 199 8: 7± 13 ). The only cure for this decay, he
tells his readers, lies in a reassertion of Japan’ s m artial spirit. To achieve this, it is
necessary to reverse the postwar U S-inspired `brainwashing’ which taught young
Japanese to be asham ed of their own history and to favour individualism over service
to the nation (Kobayashi 199 8: 49± 55). The Paci® c W ar, as re-fought by K obayashi,
was a war where self-sacri® cing Japanese com m on soldiers strove to liberate Asia
from the racist tyranny of European colonialism , leaving in their wake a landscape
adorned with new roads, railways, bridges and hospitals. Awkward details like the
N anking M assacre were sim ply products of the Am erican and/or Chinese com m u-
nist propaganda m achine. R ather it was the Chinese arm ies them selves who,
obviously m istaking Japan’ s honourable intentions, went around in¯ icting graphi-
 Anti-Area Studies 11

cally illustrated atrocities both on the Japanese liberators and on their own civilia n
population (Kobayashi 19 98 : 13 0± 136 ).
By contrast to K obayashi, who presents him self as the eternal naughty boy poking
fascist fun at his elders, Paul Sheehan presents him self as the sweetly reasonable
voice of A ustralia n com m on sense besieged by the battalions of the m ulticultural
thought police. His rhetoric, in fact, follows an interesting pattern earlier adopted by
G eoffrey Blainey in All for Australia and by the anonym ous author/s of Pauline
H anson: the Truth. D iscussions of a topic tend to begin with an unim peachably
benign general statem ent of tolerance and goodwill to m ankind. This is then
elaborated and m odi® ed by a fairly random collection of illustrations, quotations
and second-hand anecdotes which serve to radically underm ine the m essage of the
opening statem ent.
For exam ple, the chapter of Am ong the Barbarians dealing with im m igratio n begins
with two pages outlining the success of `Asian’ students (that is, of anyone with a
vaguely C hinese or Indian sounding nam e) in HSC results. This inspires the
pronouncem ent that

Australia bene® tted from the econom ic surge in A sia over the past thirty
years, when East Asia accounted for the bulk of the growth of Australia’ s
exports. The growing blends of A sian in¯ uences in Australian culture and
cuisine, and the growing num ber of young interracial couples, are happy
by-products of this evolution. A pro-Asian im m igration policy [`pro-Asian’ ,
m ind you, not just `non-discrim inatory’ ] is not m erely the best policy for
Australia , it is the only viable im m igratio n policy. It is im portant to the
country’ s econom ic, cultural and m oral future. (Sheehan 19 98 : 20 2± 203 )

`But ¼ ’ begins the next paragraph, and after that predictable `but’ the reader is
treated to 17 pages of stories about `Asian’ school drop-outs, tax and welfare cheats,
drug dealers and rapists, m any of these stories derived from a disgruntled ex-public
servant’ s gossip about his form er clients’ private lives. In the process we learn
(courtesy of Sydney academ ic Richard Basham ) that `the m oral authority of the
larger society is often rejected by Asian im m igrants’ and that there is `a silence,
an opaqueness, between the m ainstream society and the Asian societies within it’ .
This silence derives from the Asians’ `ancient habits’ of inward-looking group
consciousness (Sheehan 199 8: 204).
U nlike Kobayashi Yoshinori, whose writings leave the reader in no doubt about
where he stands, Paul Sheehan’ s logic is at ® rst sight puzzling. W hat can he m ean
when he says that A ustralia should have a `pro-Asian’ im m igratio n policy? W hat
m essage does Sheehan, as a m edia professional, really think he is conveying when he
appends a series of truism s about racial tolerance to an anthology of negative
anecdotes about `Asians’ Ð in which the tag `A sian’ is liberally applied to anything
from the Chinese governm ent’ s desecration of the environm ent to Lebanese
m igrants trying to balance the fam ily budget with a little creative accounting.
D espite the obvious differences in style and content, indeed, Kobayashi’ s com ic
and Sheehan’ s best-sellers have som e features in com m on. Both Kobayashi and
Sheehan seem im pelled to write by a sense of a profound threat to the norm ality and
12 T. Morris-Suzuki

stability of national life. In the case of Sheehan’ s book, the threat is vividly depicted
by the front cover, with its arresting im age of a burning gum leafÐ a sym bol at once
of environm ental threat and im perilled national identity, but also of the tenacity of
the true A ussie spirit (for, as Sheehan’ s opening pages rem ind us, the gum tree
¯ ourishes again after ® re). The starting point of K obayashi’ s crusade, m eanwhile, is
a Japan which, although nom inally at peace, is threatened with sinister forces from
within and withoutÐ econom ic instability, youth crim e and prostitution, drug deal-
ing (im plicitly linked to the rising presence of foreign m igrants in Japan). All of
these, according to Kobayashi, add up to the real antithesis of `peace’ , which is not
`war’ but `disorder’ . Though the authors them selves, as well-paid and high-pro® le
m edia ® gures, are both clearly part of a socially privile ged stratum , the threat to
nationhood in both books is seen as com ing above all from a treacherous cosm opoli-
tan elite, which the authors som ehow m anage to present as entirely divorced from
them selves.
I do not want to over-em phasise the im portance of these expressions of ® n-de-sieÁ cle
nationalism . Kobayashi’ s and Sheehan’ s books m ay have been best-sellers, but that
does not necessarily m ean that those who bought their books also bought their
argum ents. The popularity of the egregious Kobayashi has to be balanced against an
appreciation of the changing relationships between Japan and other East Asian
countries, and particularly of the (in som e respects) encouraging recent opening-up
of relations between Japan and the R epublic of Korea. Sim ilarly , the success of
Am ong the Barbarians needs to be assessed in the context of an Australian society
which has changed im m easurably since the days of the W hite Australia policy. At the
sam e tim e, though, the persistence, and even resurgence, of various negative
stereotypes of racial and national `others’ in the late 199 0s has to be an issue of
concern to anyone involved in the exchange of ideas between Australia and various
parts of the Asian region.

Area Studies and Ethnocentrism

Having been involved in Asian studiesÐ and m ore speci® cally in Japanese studiesÐ
in Australia for about the past 18 years, I ® nd m yself increasingly im pelled to re¯ ect
on the effect that education about `A sia’ has had within Australian society. To what
extent has the enorm ous expansion of the study of `Asia’ ful® lled Julian Steward’ s
m id-century vision of area studies as a cure for ethnocentrism ? Has the effort to
understand `unfam iliar cultures’ as self-consistent and intelligible wholes served the
cause of giving `the laym an’ greater tolerance? In attem pting to answer those
questions, I have to begin by adm itting to a deep personal antipathy to the word
`tolerance’ . (W ho, after all, wants to be tolerated?) A t the sam e tim e, though, it
would seem unreasonable not to sym pathise with Steward’ s obvious longing for a
® eld of study which would prom ote hum an understanding and m utual appreciation
rather than fear and loathing. It would also be a m istake to underestim ate the
profound contribution which the great growth of A sian studies in Australia over the
past two decades has m ade to that understanding. It is surely not coincidental that
support for groups like One N ation is lower am ongst younger generations of
 Anti-Area Studies 13

A ustralians than it is am ongst older generationsÐ although it is also worth noting

that the really sharp divide seem s to be between the over-® fties and younger groups,
with little appreciable difference in attitudes between the cohort who grew up in the
196 0s and the cohorts who grew up in the 19 70 s and 19 80 s.
At the sam e tim e, though, I feel that there are good reasons for som e self-critical
re¯ ection, not sim ply about the am ount of `Asian’ content in the curriculum but
about the whole fram ework within which knowledge of the world beyond A ustralia’ s
boundaries is taught, researched and debated. O ne issue which obviously prom pts
that re¯ ection is the enduring in¯ uence of sim plistic and reductionist generalisations
about `Asia’ and `A sians’ in the Australia n m edia and in public discourse. It is worth
noting how readily the analysis of area specialists like Richard Basham can be
m obilised to give a veneer of academ ic respectability to Paul Sheehan’ s polem ics.
M ore widely than this, though, there is also the problem that I referred to earlier
as the `unintelligibility’ of the world. The global resurgence of nationalism s and
ethnocentrism s in the past decade seem s to re¯ ect a very real and widespread feeling
of powerlessnessÐ alm ost, one m ight say, of disenfranchisem entÐ am ongst the citi-
zens of m any countries. This feeling of powerlessness in turn appears to derive from
a sense of being at the m ercy of forces and institutionsÐ m any of them crossing the
boundaries of nations and regionsÐ whose workings are not just beyond the control
of ordinary people but are also alm ost totally inscrutable. V ery few people now, I
think, would subscribe to Julian Steward’ s vision of the developm ent of a `universal
social science’ which would render these forces and institutions totally transparent.
But it is worth asking how well education and research in Australia serve the cause
of helping to m ake a com plex and rapidly changing world system at least a little bit
m ore com prehensible to the population at large. The argum ent that I want to m ake
here is that the spatial fram eworks of understandingÐ the im age of `areas’ Ð which
has em erged from `area studies’ is in som e respects an obstacle which m akes the
nature of the contem porary world system less rather than m ore visible and com pre-
hensible. A rethinking of the spatial fram eworks of teaching and research is therefore
an im portant elem ent in working through ways in which education confronts the
problem of an unintelligible world. And the ® rst step in that rethinking has to be a
re-exam ination of the origins of the existing fram ework of area studies.

T he Origins of Area Stud ies

A rea studies can be understood as having em erged from a re-im agining of space
which took place in the m iddle decades of the twentieth century. A particularly
im portant feature of this re-im agining was that it created a com m on spatial fram e-
work which could be used by a variety of different hum anities and social sciences,
and which therefore m arked out a space for the interdisciplinary study of societies
as totalities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the various disci-
plines had tended to operate on different spatial planes. For geographers, the m ajor
large-scale divisions of the world were continents, whose boundaries were de® ned by
the physical geography of oceans, m ountain ranges and so on. For political scien-
tists, on the other hand, nations and colonial em pires were m ore signi® cant divisions
14 T. Morris-Suzuki

of space. Historians, m eanwhile, also tended to operate m ostly at the national level,
but if they thought in larger term s were m ore likely to use concepts such as Occident
and O rient (as em ployed by writers like Oswald Spengler and K arl W ittvogel).
(In Japan, indeed, it was conventional until the m id-twentieth century to divide
historical knowledge into Oriental and Occidental historyÐ Toyoshi and Seiyoshi).
The contem porary im age of `areas’ such as the M iddle East and East and
Southeast Asia crystallised in the m iddle of the twentieth century against the
background of the rising international tensions which culm inated in the Second
W orld W ar. The expression `Middle East’ in its current m eaning, for exam ple, was
® rst used by the British and U S m ilitary in the 193 0s± 19 40 s, while the label
`Southeast Asia’ `entered popular consciousness in W orld W ar II, when m ilitary
strategists used it to ª designate the theatre of war com m anded by Lord Louis
M ountbattenº ’ (Lewis & W igen 199 7: 65± 66, 172 ). D uring the war, the work of the
U S Ethnogeographic Board helped to lay the foundations for the postwar boom in
area studies by de® ning the new classi® catory system of `world regions’ (Lewis and
W igen 199 7: 162 ± 16 6).
The war and its afterm ath drew attention to the strategic value of cultural
knowledge: inform ation about the languages, histories and traditions of geographi-
cally distant allies and enem ies was vital to the conduct of war, and to the
international power struggles of the Cold W ar world. D uring the 195 0s U S policy
m akers explicitly recognised that the developm ent of area studies program s could
contribute to the successful exercise of U S world power, and substantial funding for
this developm ent was provided under the term s of the 195 8 D efense Education Act
(N ash et al. 19 97 : 91 ).
In Australia, too, the Paci® c W ar drew attention to the need for expertise in the
languages, societies and political system s of neighbouring regions, particularly Asia,
and `Oriental A ffairs’ (as it was then called) was seen as an area of study deserving
special national attention (Botsm an 19 91 : 241 ). This led, am ongst other things, to
the establishm ent of a School of O riental Languages at Canberra U niversity College
in 195 2 and to the creation of a D epartm ent of Oriental Studies within the R esearch
School of Paci® c Studies at the Australian N ational U niversity. D uring the course
of the 19 50 s, funding for Indonesian and M alayan studies was also provided to
Sydney and Melbourne U niversities. In the postwar developm ent in A sian studies,
therefore, m ost courses tended to be offered in interdisciplinary, regionally focused
departm ents (Ingleson & N airn 198 9: 34).
Fundam ental to postwar visions of area studies were the notions of `culture’ and
`civilisation’ , which becam e key unifying concepts connecting varied disciplinary
approaches to the study of a given region. A s we have seen, an em phasis on the
relationship between society and culture, and on cooperation between the disci-
plines, was central to the work of Julian Steward, who played a leading role in the
U S Social Science R esearch Council’ s Com m ittee on W orld A rea Research. Mean-
while other scholars such as Robert Red® eld, who in 19 51 helped to establish the
Ford Foundation’ s Cultural Studies Project, were focusing attention on the com par-
ative study of civilisationsÐ `civilisation’ being de® ned by R ed® eld as a culture which
possessed not only a `little tradition of the largely unre¯ ective m any’ but also a `great
 Anti-Area Studies 15

tradition of the re¯ ective few’ (Sartori 19 98 ; Red® eld 195 6: 70 ). Red® eld, like
Steward, saw great potential for a bringing together of hum anities and social science
disciplines in collaborative efforts to com prehend the past and present of particular
societies. Knowledge of the dom inant civilisational patterns of each m ajor world
region would, it was felt, provide a historical basis for interpreting the contem porary
and future destiny of each region in an interconnected m odern world. Such U S
approaches had a substantial im pact on the developm ent of area studies in other
countries including Australia, where studies by U S area specialists (like John
Fairbank, Edwin Reischauer and Albert Craig in Asian studies) cam e to be widely
used as texts for an expanding range of area-focused courses.
The developm ent of area studies in the U SA and Australia also resonated with
em erging European approaches to the study of the world. Red® eld’ s concept of
com parative civilisations, for exam ple, drew on the ideas of British scholar Arnold
Toynbee, whose m assive study of civilisational history was published in 12 volum es
between 19 34 and 196 1. Toynbee’ s classi® cation of civilisations was idiosyncraticÐ
based above all on the foundational role of the great religionsÐ but his research was
driven by m any of the im pulses which inspired other varieties of m id-century area
studies (Toynbee 19 34 [196 1]).
M eanwhile in France a som ewhat different version of civilisational history was
em erging from the postwar work of the Annales school. From its founding in the late
192 0s, the Annales group had envisioned large-scale collaborations between scholars
trained in dem ography, psychology, social statistics and other disciplines, working
together to produce a `total history’ of the everyday life of particular societies (see,
for exam ple, Febvre 19 73; Dosse 1994). D uring the 195 0s and 19 60 s, Fernand
Braudel built on this approach to present a vision of the global history centred upon
m ajor civilisational areas each of which `has its own geography with its own
opportunities and constraints, som e virtually perm anent and quite different from
one civilizat ion to another’ (Braudel 199 4: 11 ). Braudel’ s fam ous textbook for
French high school students, Gram m aire des Civilizations, divided the world into six
m ajor areas: A m erica, the M uslim W orld, A frica, the Far East, Europe and that
`Other Europe’ constituted by the Soviet U nion. Each area, he argued, possessed its
own deep underlying structuresÐ `religious beliefs, for instance, or a tim eless peas-
antry, or attitudes to death, work, pleasure and fam ily life’ Ð structures which
persisted with only the m ost gradual of changes beneath the ever-shifting surface of
transient historical events (Braudel 199 4: 11 ).

M ap ping C ultures

Braudel’ s study indeed offers a vivid illustration of som e of the key strengths and
weaknesses of the postwar area approach. On the one hand, it represented a genuine
and deeply felt desire for a m ore universal understanding of social phenom enaÐ an
approach which would transcend the bounds of narrow nationalism or ethnocen-
trism . O n the other, however, its tem poral and spatial fram eworks alm ost ines-
capably im posed particular lim itations on the im age of the world which it presented.
In order to deal with the study of very large areas such as `the Far East’ , Braudel’ s
16 T. Morris-Suzuki

account begins by singling out certain features which were seen as fundam ental
cultural characteristics of the entire area. In the case of the `Far East’ , for exam ple,
these included rice cultivation, the tenacious in¯ uence of old-established creeds such
as Buddhism and Confucianism , and the eternal antagonism between settled civili-
sations and the `barbarian hordes’ who constantly threatened their borders (Braudel
199 4: 15 5± 17 0). Such deep structures provided the foundations on which the
distinctive, and m ore rapidly changing, political, econom ic and social form ations of
individual nations within the area were built. N ations in turn em braced local regions
whichÐ with their particular productive system s and cultural traditionsÐ form ed the
locus of everyday life. This structure closely parallels that of m any of the m ajor area
studies texts of the postwar decadesÐ works like Reischauer and Fairbank’ s East
Asia: the Great TraditionÐ in which an overview of the underlying civilisational
patterns of the region provided the starting point for m ore detailed analysis of
the individual destinies of particular nations (See Reischauer & Fairbank 195 8;
R eischauer et al. 19 73 ).
The dif® culty with this approach is that, since a region like `the Far East’ or `East
A sia’ is a vast and diverse one with few overarching com m onalities, those few
characteristics which are shared by m uch of the region tend to be singled out as
`fundam ental’ and (it could be argued) given disproportionate weight. A good
exam ple of this is the obsessive attention paid to that shifting com plex of ideas and
practices com m only labelled `Confucianism ’ . It seem s clear that the in¯ uence of
`Confucianism ’ has varied enorm ously across the region according to place, tim e
and social class, and that for m any people in m any tim es it had little or no in¯ uence
at all. But the visions of `Chinese’ , `Japanese’ and `Korean’ histories as contained
within the fram ework of `East A sian’ history m akes it alm ost inevitable that plausible
com m on denom inators like `Confucianism ’ will com e to be seen as the underlying
m otive forces of the region’ s past.
The overall outcom e tends to be an im age of the individual as standing at the
centre of a series of ever-expanding circles of shared history, culture and m em ory.
The richest and m ost varied array of com m on experiences, traditions and beliefs are
shared with the im m ediately proxim ate com m unities of fam ily, local com m unity,
villag e or town. A s one m oves outward in space the sharing of m ore transient
m em ories and experiences dim inishes, leaving only the deeper strata of enduring
culture which (it is suggested) are shared, ® rst with other m em bers of the national
com m unity and, at the profoundest level, with fellow inhabitants of the entire
civilisational area.
U S area studies scholars like Steward and Red® eld, rather sim ilarly, saw area
studies as operating at a num ber of spatial levels, ranging from `com m unities
through regions, states and nations to large cultural areas’ (Steward 195 0: 20 ; see
also Red® eld 195 6: ch. 3). Area studies required both detailed, usually ethno-
graphic, studies of sm all local com m unities and larger interdisciplinary studies of
nations and world regions. Steward thus likened m ultilevel area research on hum an
societies to m ultilevel biological research on living organisms, in which `the cell is
incom pletely understood if it is not studied as part of an organ; and an organ is
intelligible only as part of a total organism’ (Steward 195 0: 109 ).
 Anti-Area Studies 17

But m apping the world in this way obscures hum an com m onalities not based on
geographical proxim ity, not containable within the frontiers of `nation’ , `area’ or
`civilisation’ . Of course, the area scholars of the 19 50 s recognised that civilisations
interacted, and above all that `m odern western civilisation’ affected the lives of
people throughout the world. The very nature of area studies, however, m ade it
dif® cult to pursue investigation of the cultural com m onalities which m ight link
people in widely dispersed geographical locations on the basis of occupation, age
or interest (for exam ple, the com m onalities between Catholics in Ireland and
Zim babwe, or between soccer fans in The N etherlands and Brazil).
Rather than opening the way to exploration of sharedÐ or differingÐ experiences
of the `m odern’ , area studies encouraged a com parative approach to the understand-
ing of a process called `m odernisation’ . To what extent, in other words, did
`m odernity’ represent the trium ph of the W estern m odel of civilisation? To what
extent could the fundam ental patterns of other civilisations survive within, and adapt
to, the m odern order? W hich areas possessed the patterns of culture and tradition
that would best equip them for participation in the com petitive struggle for social
and econom ic developm ent?
Area studies also involved a distinctive relation of scholars to their subject m atter.
The classical Orientalists of the nineteenth century had found it necessary to rely
substantially on the interpretation of the written archive. Their work, until the
m id-twentieth century, was supplem ented by the writings of colonial of® cials, whose
social experiences were shaped by the hierarchical structures of life in the colonies,
yet who had often been required to im m erse them selves in the details of adm inister-
ing a particular con® ned territory. The postwar area scholar lived in a different
world: a world of air travel, an age of `® eldwork’ Ð a concept extended from
anthropology to a wide range of other disciplines in the m iddle decades of the
century. From their base in the cam puses of the developed world, area specialists
were able to venture forth, arm ed with a training in disciplinary techniques and
theories as well as language, for regular stints of research in `the ® eld’ . Im plicitly,
this research was envisaged as using the latest `universal’ social theories, generated
within the academ ic realm s of W estern Europe and N orth Am erica, to interpret the
diverse com plexities of the particular region on which the area specialist focused.
The scholar would thus return from the ® eld with em pirical data and case studies to
enrich the developm ent of universal social theory. N o one can doubt that postwar
area scholars in the still-dom inant nations of W estern Europe and N orth Am erica
contributed greatly to a deeper understanding of A sian, A frican and other societies
and histories. Yet the very fram eworks within which their work was conducted
m eant that this understanding did not necessarily lead to any fundam ental rethink-
ing of the vision of `western civilisation’ as interpreter of the world, and as crucible
of the m odern.

C ritiques of Area Stu dies

In recent decades, of course, area studies has been criticised from several directions.
A frequent focus of criticism has been the intim ate connection between this ® eld of
18 T. Morris-Suzuki

research and U S Cold W ar strategy (e.g. W allerstein 19 97 ; Cum ings 199 7). W hile
m any U S scholars resolutely resisted efforts by the state to m obilise their research for
strategic purposes, there are num erous well-docum ented exam ples of governm ent
m anipulation of area research in the Cold W ar period. G eorge Kahin, for exam ple,
cites the case of V ietnam P erspectives, an ostensibly `academ ic’ journal launched
in 19 67 with substantial support and funding from the U S m ilitary’ s Historical
Evaluation and R esearch O rganization (Kahin 199 7).
At a m ethodological level, area specialists have been accused of exaggerating the
autonom y of individual civilisations and for paying insuf® cient attention to connec-
tions between one region and another. The civilisation theory of scholars like
Toynbee has also been taken to task on the grounds that, by identifying `civilisation’
with powerful urbanised com m unities, it neglected large swathes of hum an society
(see Lewis & W igen 19 97 : 13 0± 13 1; N ash et al. 19 97 : 16 4± 17 1). Yet this critique
has not necessarily led to a rejection of the organising fram ework of large contiguous
regions de® ned in term s of an underlying com m on culture. Instead, it has tended to
produce m odi® cations of that im age, in which boundaries are redrawn in the effort
to create a m ore coherent and inclusive picture (see, for exam ple, Lewis & W igen
199 7: 15 7).
One im portant m odi® cation to the postwar im age of area studies was the em erg-
ence of the concept of the `Asia± Paci® c’ or `Paci® c Rim ’ , which enjoyed a vogue
particularly in the 19 70 s and 198 0s. This new vision of geography transcended
traditionally de® ned visions of `civilisations’ , and sought to bring together the study
of Asian, Am erican and Australasian regions, which were in fact increasingly being
linked by econom ic and cultural ¯ ows. As Arif D irlik points out, however, the new
concept itself was deeply em bedded in the em erging econom ic and political power
structures of the late twentieth century. The concept of the Asia± Paci® c area served
to:

set up a dom ain of econom ic activity and power for those who play a
hegem onic role in the area (at present, the U nited States and Japan), to
contain within it the relationships that in and of them selves are not
con® ned to it, and thereby to assert a regional identity (and power bloc)
against other sim ilar regions in the world system , of which the European
Econom ic Com m unity is the im m ediate instance. (D irlik 199 2)

The new interest in the `A sia± Paci® c’ coincided with a renewed wave of expansion
of Asian studies in Australia, now driven less by strategic concerns than by a growing
awareness of the region’ s econom ic im portance. A central elem ent in this expansion
was the growing num ber of students studying Asian languages. By 19 96 , 35 of
A ustralia ’ s 43 universities taught Japanese, 29 taught Chinese and 25 Indonesian
(Aveling 19 98 : 33 ). The relative strength of A ustralian scholarship in som e areas of
A sian studies (particularly research on Southeast A sia) was re¯ ected by the fact that
40 per cent of the articles published in Cam bridge U niversity Press’ s Modern Asian
Studies between 198 6 and 19 96 were written by scholars based in A ustralian
universities (Ingleson 199 8: 253 ).
M eanwhile, however, a som ewhat different criticism of area studies was increas-
 Anti-Area Studies 19

ingly m aking itself heard. A rea studies schools and departm ents, it was argued, were
not giving their students a suf® ciently rigorous disciplinary grounding. In Australia ,
alm ost exactly 10 years ago, the Report of the Inquiry into the Teaching of Asian
Studies and Languages in Higher Education observed that the `Asian studies m odel’
had

tended to m arginalize the study of Asia, by cutting it off from the m ajor
disciplines and producing graduates who had a great deal of knowledge of
one or m ore A sian country, often pro® ciency in a language as well, but who
were inadequately trained in one of the social sciences disciplines, such as
history, politics, sociology or econom ics. It also acted as an excuse for
discipline departm ents ignoring the study of A sia. (Ingleson & N airn 19 89 :
26 0)

The report went on to propose greater integration of Asian content into `m ain-
stream ’ hum anities and social science departm ents, recom m ending that by the year
200 0 at least 20 per cent of student enrolm ents in those departm ents should be in
`Asia related’ subjects (Ingleson and N airn 19 89 : 265 ).
In practice, though, this proposal seem s to have proved rem arkably dif® cult to put
into effect. The 199 8 Australian R esearch Council review of the hum anities in
A ustralia revealed that initial efforts at greater integration had wilted in the face of
the harsh econom ic clim ate of the 19 90 s (Hooper 199 8: 58 ; Coaldrake & W ells
199 8: 15 5; Ingleson 199 8: 25 9). Although som e of the newer cross-disciplinary
areas like (predictably enough) Postcolonial Studies pay substantial attention to
various A sian societies, m any of the older disciplines rem ained overwhelm ingly
focused on Europe and North A m erica. In philosophy, which we are told `is usually
thought of as a distinctively W estern discipline’ , recent developm ents in the teaching
of Asian philosophy can be dealt with in a couple of sentences (G aukroger 199 8:
223 ). The situation in relation to areas like Early Modern Studies is even m ore
interesting. Here, `Asia’ rates a m ention only because A sian history is seen as a
potential com petitor with Early M odern Studies for student enrolm ents. D id places
like Japan have an `Early Modern’ (as m ost Japanese historians clearly seem to
believe it did), and, if so, how does this relate to the Early M odern studied by `Early
M odern Studies’ ?
The ongoing tension between area studies and disciplines re¯ ects, I think, som e-
thing m ore than institutional rigidities and budgetary constraints. It re¯ ects the fact
that both the traditional disciplines and area studies often incorporate sim ilar
underlying assum ptions about the nature of social space. Both, in other words, tend
to take for granted the reality and integrity of entities like `Latin A m erica’ or
`Southeast A sia’ . They also incorporate sim ilar ideas about the relationship between
scholar and subject of study. That is to say, disciplinary as well as area studies often
em body an im plicit im age of `the W est’ as the fountainhead of theories with which
to interpret the rest of the world. So com m endable efforts to encourage the inclusion
of m aterial from A sian societies in various disciplinary courses in Australia have gone
hand in hand with a worrying tendency to insist that the object of the exercise is to
prom ote `Asia literacy’ Ð as though `A sia’ were a sort of hieroglyphic docum ent
20 T. Morris-Suzuki

which would becom e legible if only we could crack the code. The `W estern’ scholar
is still assum ed to stand within a legible, transparent space which is the source of
theories with which to interpret the enigm atic areas outside. From this perspective,
A ustralia can all too readily com e to be presented as an outpost of W estern
universalism fortunately located close to the perplexing realm s of A sia, and so
offering a convenient salient from which to `interpret’ Asia to the (English-speaking)
world.

T he Possibility of Anti-Area Studies

In this context, it is crucially im portant to resist one particular variant of the critique
of area studies: the view that the entire legacy of area studies should be abandoned
in favour of a new brand of universalism based on the dom inance of disciplinary
knowledge. This view, recently popular in som e schools of econom ic and political
thought, proposes that all societies are to be understood in term s of a single set of
rules of behaviour, centred around notions such as `rational choice’ . D etailed
knowledge of language and history of speci® c societies thus becom es irrelevant to
interpreting contem porary trends, for once one has m astered the rules contained in
the latest texts from Chicago or M IT, the behaviour of everyone from Javanese rice
farm ers to Taiwanese pop stars will be readily understandable and predictable.
W hat I would like to suggest here is a different approach to the rethinking of area
studiesÐ one that retains its sensitivity to com plexity and difference, and therefore
its em phasis on the im portance of detailed knowledge of hum an lives in particular
places. At the sam e tim e, this approach would seek to reverse the process of spatial
integration, through which area studies sought to create a single fram ework for the
interdisciplinary study of social wholes. In trying to m ake sense of the contem porary
system it seem s instead im portant to be able to m ake sim ultaneous use of a range of
different spatial m aps to analyse different social processes and interactions (M azlish
199 3: 19 , 19 98 ).
The point is not that the concept of `areas’ like East or Southeast Asia is an
anachronism to be thrown on to the intellectual scrap heap. The area studies vision
of world regions as a basis for understanding has obvious uses. For a historian who
wants to study the spread and evolution of the character-based writing system which
originated in China, for exam ple, the geographical category `East A sia’ m akes sense
(though it would m ake even better sense if it were expanded to encom pass m ost of
V ietnam Ð now usually classi® ed under the heading `Southeast A sia’ ). But using
`East Asia’ as the prim ary space for understanding the whole past and present of the
area now encom passed by the nations of China, M ongolia, Japan, K orea and
Taiwan is m uch m ore problem atic. Dif® culties arise when concentric circles of
contiguous space com e to be seen as the fram ework for a total understanding of the
past and present, for this m odel of space obscures a host of experiences vital to
interpreting the contem porary global system .
W hat I would like to suggest here, then, is not a bland erasure of differences, but
rather an attem pt to rethink the way in which to m ap difference. One im portant
elem ent in this new m apping m ight be the developm ent of an `anti-area studies’ ,
 Anti-Area Studies 21

whose aim is not to plot the com m unal trajectory of a civilisational area within the
m arch of global progress, but to observe m ajor global forces from a variety of
positions which are as far apart as possible. Let us consider som e exam ples of
possible them es of this type of `anti-area studies’ .
One them e could be a topic which I am currently particularly interested in: the
past and present of indigenous com m unities in various parts of the world. D espite
their great diversity, indigenous societies world-wide face certain sorts of com m on
challenges and problem s which arise not from innate cultural sim ilaritie s, but from
shared experiences of the encounter between sm all, relatively decentralised com -
m unities and the m odern nation-state. Form s of study and teaching which link the
experiences of indigenous societies in (say) A ustralia , the Philippines, Japan, Russia
and Brazil can bring to light im portant issues, differences and com m onalities, which
rem ain invisible when the history of indigenous societies is studied in a national or
even a conventional `area studies’ fram ework.
Another type of `anti-area’ studies concerns the way in which a particular set of
ideas or ideologies is understood, applied and developed in quite different situations.
Exam ples of this are recent research projects on the varied experiences around the
world of the late 1960s student m ovem ent. Here it becom es possible to consider
how people from a broadly sim ilar social stratum Ð m ostly young, m iddle-class and
university educatedÐ related to a broadly com m on set of ideologies in radically
different circum stances. W hat is im portant, though, is that the `m ap’ of 19 68 should
include not only places like Paris, Berkeley and London but also Tokyo, Mexico
City, Melbourne and Calcutta. In a sim ilar vein, one m ight consider the way in
which various new (and not so new) form s of religious thoughtÐ Scientology or the
U ni® cation ChurchÐ are received and evolve in distinct locations.
A third possible variant of `anti-area study’ would be research on the social
form ation of global system s or organisations: organisations like the W orld Bank or
U N IC EF. Such studies would explore both the evolution of these organisations and
their interaction with local society in m any parts of the world. This research m ight
help to illum inate the ways in which international bodies, with their world-wide
networks of em ployees and of® ces, develop their own set of cultural resources and
behavioural patterns: shared `traditions’ which transcend the boundaries of conven-
tionally de® ned `areas’ . The m ap appropriate for this sort of study cannot be
predicted in advance but would need to be carefully tailored to the research task. It
m ight, however, focus on selected points in Asia, Africa and the A m ericas, and
include urban as well as villag e com m unities. Research and teaching on these
them es seem s particularly im portant as a m eans of confronting the sense of incom -
prehension and powerlessness induced by the increasing com plexity of international
rules, system s and cultural ¯ ows in the contem porary world.
Pushing this point a bit further, we could consider whether understanding of the
so-called `Asian’ (but increasingly global) econom ic crisis m ight be im proved if we
stopped trying to understand it in `A sian’ term s, with the help of a ready-m ade
tool-kit of concepts like `crony capitali sm’ and the `developm ental state’ . A n alterna-
tive m ight be to look at the crisis in term s of the practical, everyday ways in which
people experience and deal with the unsettling effects of global econom ic change in
22 T. Morris-Suzuki

a num ber of very different sites throughout the world: sites which m ight, for
instance, include Adelaide, Sapporo, Hong Kong, and SaÄ o Paulo. Such a study
would not, of course, assum e a sam eness of experience in all these places, but could
allow differences to becom e visible in action, rather than starting out from a set of
preconceptions about `A sian’ (or other) culture and its econom ic consequences.
`A nti-area studies’ in this sense would require m any of the skills traditionally
dem anded of area studies specialists. It would need people with a real knowledge of
different languages and societies, and with a strong theoretical understanding of the
issues to be researched or taught. It would also often involve collaboration between
several scholars studying, and based in, different places. But it would differ from
conventional area studies in the sense that it neither pulls together a range of
disciplines into the study of a single social `whole’ , nor com bines a variety of area
specialism s into a single discipline. Instead, it uses knowledge of a variety of places
and a variety of disciplinary approaches in order to elucidate problem s which cross
boundaries. In doing this, it accepts the need to draw its own m aps.
Rather than prom oting `Asia literacy’ , I would suggest, `anti-area studies’ m ight
aim to prom ote conversation: an exchange of views between groups of people in
A ustralia , certain parts of A sia and other parts of the world, about issues of deep
com m on concern. The object of the exercise, in other words, would not be to
`understand Asia’ Ð nor even to understand particular societies within AsiaÐ but to
gain a better understanding of an unintelligible world by viewing som e of its key
features from widely separated points of the globe. The m ultiple m aps used for this
purpose would link geographically dispersed places in term s of their relevance to a
com m on them e, and would include places in the scholar’ s hom e base itself: in m y
case, Canberra. In this process `Australia’ m ight cease to be seen as a convenient
universalist salient point from which to `read’ A sia. Instead, people and places in
A ustralia would becom e part of the problem to be understood and `read’ Ð in an
interconnected series of points upon the earth, not only re¯ ecting but becom ing
objects of re¯ ection.
Australian N ational U niversity

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