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Three Principles for an Asian Humanities: Care First . . . Learn From . . . Connect Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2014

Donald R. Davis
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Abstract

In order to express what is uniquely accomplished in the field, Asian studies should be reconceived as Asian humanities and should adhere to three principles: care first, learn from, and connect histories. A review of the history and criticisms of Asian studies as a field calls for a positive theoretical articulation of what the best scholarship in Asian studies does and has done. The principles advocated here are not exclusive to Asian studies and should be extended to all area studies fields, but they are offered as a way to understand Asian studies as an essential field of the university and the academy, unique because of its content but common in spirit with the humanities generally.

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Research Article
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 74 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 43 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2014 

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References

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2 The criticisms of area studies influenced by Said's arguments should by now be well known to readers of this journal. I do not want to rehearse those criticisms at length here, because others have already described the limitations and problems of area studies better than I could. For surveys of and responses to the issues, see Waters, Neil, ed., Beyond the Area Studies Wars: Toward a New International Studies (Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press. 2000)Google Scholar; Mirsepassi, Ali, Basu, Amrita, and Weaver, Frederick, eds., Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Miyoshi, Masao and Harootunian, Harry, eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Szanton, David, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

3 In 2011, Title VI program funding for National Resource Centers in area studies was suddenly cut in half. Uncertainty about whether Title VI will be eliminated altogether still plagues the field at the moment. Racism, religious zealotry, hypernationalism, and xenophobia underlie the political success of these uninformed, patently agenda-driven criticisms of governmental support for area studies. Budget concerns are the whitewash for a demonstrably anti-human agenda.

4 The primary point of attack has been Middle Eastern studies, but that attack has affected all area studies. In the charged political environment in the United States surrounding Islam and Muslims, a veritable cottage industry has arisen around efforts to “monitor” academic discourse on the “Middle East.”

5 Malini Johar Schueller lays out a devastating critique of the factless claims and politically motivated faux expertise involved in the calls for more governmental oversight of Title VI beginning in the 1990s. Schueller, Malini Johar, “Area Studies and Multicultural Imperialism: The Project of Decolonizing Knowledge,” Social Text 25, no. 1 (2007): 41–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 Hamilton Gibb once called this the “Trojan horse” role of area studies, “to awaken and stimulate with the general academic community a growing interest in and concern with non-Western civilisations in the disciplinary departments and faculties.” Gibb, Hamilton, Area Studies Reconsidered (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1963), 6–7Google Scholar.

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13 One unfortunate problem that still persists in Asian studies is that Asian scholars are encouraged to close themselves off from their own or other Asian cultures and practices in order to focus on what is considered academically important. See Narayanan, Vasudha, “Diglossic Hinduism: Liberation and Lentils,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 4 (2004): 761–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for her account of how lentils always seemed more important to Hindus than liberation, but not among her classmates at Harvard. The principles of this essay, I hope, apply equally to all, though what it would take to apply them will vary greatly from person to person.

14 Ajay Skaria (167–69) has written insightfully about the affinities between Gandhi's notion of satyagraha and Levinas's ethics, while also exploring other positive and negative consequences of Gandhi's ideas. Skaria, Ajay, “The Strange Violence of Satyagraha: Gandhi, Itihaas, and History,” in Heterotopias: Nationalism and the Possibility of History in South Asia, ed. Bhagavan, Manu, 142–85 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

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26 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 73. John Nemec's defense of translation as an indispensable mode of scholarship, for example, argues that “the unbroken translation requires the scholar to honor the intellectual prerogatives and indeed the intellectual vision of the author” (774). Translation in his sense strikes me as the best way to preserve the otherness of a written text, that is to care for its “saying” and not just what is says. Nemec, John, “Translation and the Study of Indian Religions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77, no. 4 (2009): 757–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 It is important to point out that even, perhaps especially, the study of classical languages requires special attention to the “saying” over the “said” for at least two reasons. First, no study of classical languages is ever an unmediated encounter with a decontextualized past. The contemporary legacies of classical cultures and particularly the intellectual burden of their study is continually passed down to us in ways that we must investigate. Second, the philological examination of “dead” languages is always best pursued with as much contextualization as possible, that is, an attempt to discern and imaginatively experience the saying of a text. Just studying texts and language is, in itself, no guarantee of caring first.

28 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 88–91.

29 Two of his favorite literary references are to Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, “each of us is guilty in everything, before everyone, and I most of all” (Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa [New York: Knopf (1880) 1992], 289Google Scholar), and Grossman, Vasily, Life and Fate, trans. Chandler, Robert (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

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33 See the U.S. Department of Education, “The History of Title VI and Fulbright-Hays: An Impressive International Timeline,” January 21, 2011, http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/history.html (accessed January 8, 2014). For a statement from near the inception of area studies, see Bennett, Wendell C., Area Studies in American Universities (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1951)Google Scholar, 5: “The principal problem which faces the universities is how they can serve the government's expanding need for personnel and the requirements for specialized area training programs without disrupting the highly important function of training research scholars.”

34 Patrick Olivelle's new translation of the Arthaśāstra will make such ignorance harder to sustain. Olivelle, Patrick, King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 The issue is reviewed from the academic perspective in the special issue on “Who Speaks for Hinduism?” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 4 (2000)Google Scholar.

36 See Leo Strauss's famous essay and the ensuing commentary on it: Strauss, Leo, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections,” Commentary 43 (1967): 45–57Google Scholar.

37 Levinas, too, acknowledges and approves of this link of Greek philosophy with the dominance of ontology and totality: “theorizing, is Greek . . . when we think, we speak Greek even if we do not know this language” (Levinas, “Reality Has Weight,” 161).

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42 Ibid., 17.

43 Ibid., 302.

44 Ibid., 111.

45 Ibid., 306.

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52 Diana Eck's study of the religious diversity of the contemporary United States, particularly of Asian religions, testifies to the proximity of Asia. Eck, Diana, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001)Google Scholar.

53 Compare L. L. Zamenhof in a letter from 1895: “I was educated as an idealist. I was taught that all people were brothers; meanwhile on the street and in the courtyard, everything at every turn caused me to feel that people did not exist: only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, etc.” Zamenhof, L. L., Originala verkaro [Collected original works], ed. Dietterle, Johann (Leipzig: Ferdinand Hirt, 1929), 418Google Scholar. Afsar Mohammad quoted to me an Urdu ghazal of Josh Malihabadi (d. 1982) expressing the same sentiment: “Insān kahāṁ hai kis kurre meṁ gum hai / hindū hai koī, aur musalmān koī.” (Where is the Human? In what pit does it hide? Here is a Hindu, there a Muslim.)

54 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Connected Histories: Notes toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Ibid., 742–43.

56 Ibid., 743.

57 Ibid., 743.

58 Ibid., 761–62.

59 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “On the Window that Was India,” in Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, 1–16 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4Google Scholar.

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65 Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed. Criticism of Scott's work on both factual and conceptual grounds has come quickly, though always with a tremendous debt to Scott for exactly the kind of provocation that has forced others to take up new connected histories between Southeast, South, East, and Central Asia. See Leif Jonsson's review and Victor Lieberman's review in a special issue of the Journal of Global History devoted to Zomia studies: Jonsson, Hjorleifur, “Above and Beyond: Zomia and the Ethnographic Challenge of/for Regional Histories,” History and Anthropology 21, no. 2 (2010): 191–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lieberman, Victor, “A Zone of Refuge in Southeast Asia? Reconceptualizing Interior Spaces,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 2 (2010): 333–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Justin McDaniel, for instance, demonstrates in relation to conventional understandings of Buddhist religious images “that sifting through the pile of stuff that accumulates around or on major images reveals a history of response and relationships that can tell us more about a piece of art than the name of the artist or the style of the period.” McDaniel, Justin, “The Agency between Images: The Relationships among Ghosts, Corpses, Monks, and Deities at a Buddhist Monastery in Thailand,” Material Religion 7, no. 2 (2011): 242–67 at 246CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The significance of relationships and of fun to the religiosity of image worship among Thai Buddhists is only seen by attending first to their own expressions of what images do. The relationships between these images and between images and people are a form of connected history at a micro-level.

67 See Mark Granovetter's classic essay on the “strength of weak ties” as a way to conceptualize how even small connections can have a big social impact: Granovetter, Mark S., “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 85.

69 Narayan, Kirin, “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95, no. 3 (1993): 671–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Whether my motivation for writing this essay stems from some form of “white guilt” remains a possibility, but this too is one of the unavoidable prejudices that helped me, and specifically me, formulate the essay in the way that I have. Of course, I hope others may learn from my prejudiced theoretical analysis of Asian humanities.

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73 Anumodana is an important idea in Buddhist traditions, too, but I learned it from studying Jains. For a Buddhist perspective, see Gombrich, Richard, “‘Merit Transference’ in Sinhalese Buddhism: A Case Study of the Interaction between Doctrine and Practice,” History of Religions 11, no. 2 (1971): 203–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.