Josine Stremmelaar - What about Asia?: Revisiting Asian Studies

In his article Asian Studies and the Discourse of the Human Sciences Gananath Obeyesekere explores the issue of how the native Asian scholar, as opposed to the scholar of Asian studies, can relate the discourse of the human sciences to his own cultural heritage. There is a view widely prevalent among Asian nationalist scholars, and elsewhere in the world, that one should be able to construct an indigenous social science. Obeyesekere argues that this is an unrealizable goal at present and that we cannot avoid our contemporary cosmopolitan inheritance of Enlightenment discourse. He makes a case for a more realistic approach which would use terms, concepts and ideas from ones own cultural tradition to enrich the Western discourse of the human sciences.

Obeyesekere does so by employing Buddhist ideas of no-self and the absence of essence within existence to critique the Cartesian paradigm, I think, I am. Employing primarily Buddhist visionary experiences he argues that visions are showings that occur without the mediation of the I. He then brings in Nietzsche who boldly suggested that instead of the Cartesian cogito, one should be able to say It-thinks. From here Obeyesekere moves to a form of aphoristic thinking in the Buddha, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein that again entails the appearance of condensed thoughts without the mediation of the I. And in this sense he brings about a dialogue between the European and the Buddhist Enlightenment. In other words the question he poses is: What are the areas of thinking where the self or ego does not exist and the Cartesian cogito does not operate?

Peter van der Veer in his Area Studies in a Changing World demonstrates that area studies in this context Asian studies can contribute to the deepening of knowledge on globalization because it can put the national into a global context. He first delineates the three main lines of criticism on area studies, namely that they do not produce universally valid knowledge; that they are intimately related to Western power interests and that they do not take into consideration the fluid boundaries of this age of globalization. Although Van der Veer finds truth in this criticism he points to the huge potential of area studies which allows for a more in-depth perspective on the variety of forms of globalization. According to Van der Veer, rather than a comparative stance, an all-inclusive point of departure should be taken in studying the West and the East.