Asian Studies Review.

ISSN 1035-7823
Volume 23 Number 2 June 1999

STUDYING “ASIA” IN ASIA

A NTHONY R EID
Australian National University

The four following articles have their origin in the concern to internationalise
Asian studies, which emanated from the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) in
the United States and the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) in the
Netherlands in 1996. Asianists in the Asian region, including Australia, were
somewhat marginal participants in this process, although a respectable number
attended the eventual International Congress of Asian Scholars (ICAS) in Noord-
wijkerhout, the Netherlands, in June 1998—the first fruit of this international-
isation initiative. The thoughts which underlie this essay took shape as a keynote
lecture at that conference, the organisers having generously invited one of the
more sceptical participants in the process to speak. It has been rewritten as an
introduction to the set of four articles in this volume, which I initially convened
as a panel on ‘The construction of “Asia” in Asia’ for the 1998 Conference of the
Asian Studies Association of Australia.

INTERNATIONALISATION

The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), of which I was President

in 1997–98, was predictably the most explicit of the organisations in the Asian
region in doubting the appropriateness of a new phase of internationalisation
which was not centrally concerned with our Asian colleagues. It seemed to us that
the real issue for Asian studies was how or whether it could successfully inter-
nationalise in Asia. The dangerous ambiguities of this question are perhaps par-
ticularly pressing to Asianists from Australia, the country denounced by Samuel
Huntington for contemplating defecting from the West in favour of Asia, and
becoming “a permanently torn country”—his hostile characterisation of cultural
ambivalence (Huntington 1996, 151–53). This opening essay seeks to explore
some of the dilemmas and opportunities for those in the Asian region who would
define their field as “Asian studies”.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road,
Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
142 Anthony Reid

The passing of exactly 500 years since the first military and intellectual con-
frontation between an “Asia” (then most frequently labelled “India”) and a
“Europe” rendered distinct from each other by a long sea voyage makes this an
appropriate moment to revisit the issue. Today’s globalised climate means that at
conferences such as ICAS we meet our colleagues from around the world more
comfortably than we do fellow residents of the same suburban street. The com-
munications revolution, the increasingly widespread use of English, and cheaper
airfares make internationalisation of a sort irresistible, and tax-deductible inter-
national conferences a congenial part of the process.
Asianists, though, study a particular part of that globalised world still affected
by the military, economic and intellectual domination of “the West” during most
of the last 200 years. We are all uncomfortably aware that our discipline, if that is
what it is, developed in an economically advanced “West” as a means of under-
standing a troubling “other”. If the discipline is now to be internationalised, as it
must, should the object become the subject? It may seem easy to escape from the
dangers which Edward Said (1979, 300–01 and passim) provocatively essentialised
(in the name of attacking essentialism) under the rubric of “Orientalism”—
romanticism, reductionism, the prioritising of canonical texts and the urge to
dominate or defend. But “Asian studies” remains an uneasy marriage between
core believers in the uniqueness of the discrete cultural traditions they study, and
universalising social scientists for whom “Asia” is at best an arbitrary subdivision
of the globe, at worst an obfuscation. Most of our Asian colleagues (like Khoo
Boo Teik below) are only “Asianists” when they are outside Asia, but discipline-
based social scientists when at home. If we take our stand in Asia can we continue
to be “Asianists”?
The internationalisation of Asian studies is not new. It began just 125 years ago,
in 1873, when the first International Congress of Orientalists was convened in
Paris. The early Orientalists were of course predominantly textual scholars based
in Europe,1 but the need for Europeans to grapple with their own linguistic,
cultural and political pluralisms may have given the old Orientalist Congresses a
better basis than ourselves for becoming what they aspired to be: “a true republic
of Oriental letters which shall be free and open to all enquiry, and in which all
schools, scholars and nationalities shall be on an equal footing”.2 Apart from
their markedly multilingual quality by modern standards, the congresses showed
a commendable anxiety to incorporate Asian diversity. The Iranian section of the
first Congress was presided over by the Persian Ambassador to France resplen-
dent in official robes, and both the Emperor Meiji and Yukichi Fukuzawa were
listed among its supporters. The Orientalist Congresses and their Presidents
moved outside Europe relatively early, to Algiers in 1905, Istanbul in 1951,
New Delhi in 1964, Ann Arbor in 1967, Canberra in 1971, Tokyo/Kyoto in 1983
and Hong Kong in 1993. Having first offered to host the Congress in 1902, the

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

 Studying “Asia” in Asia 143

Japanese proved patient in waiting 80 years to do so, by which time their scholar-
ship had so proliferated that 41 Japanese learned societies had to be listed as
supporters.
The Orientalists’ exclusion of contemporary political issues was abandoned
in 1954, partly under Soviet pressure, and the name was changed in Paris in 1973
to drop the embarrassing Orientalist label and adopt modern acronym-speak.
In Paris it became CISHAAN (Congrès International des Sciences Humaines
en Asie et Afrique du Nord), while in Japan in 1983 the English form ICANAS
(International Congress of Asian and North African Studies) became official.
The ICANAS Congresses remain somewhat stuffy and conscious of tradition, but
they have some useful experience of what doing “Asian studies” in Asia might
mean. I will return to that in the case of the Japanese Congress.

ASIAN STUDIES IN ASIA

Because of our conviction that, however difficult, the most important issue facing
Asian studies was whether or how it made sense in Asia, the Australian Asso-
ciation (ASAA) has been busy since 1997 extending its contacts with like-minded
groups in Asia. Together with the Institute of Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn
University, Bangkok, and with the help of the Ford Foundation, the ASAA invited
a representative group of Asianists in the Asian region to meet in Hua Hin
(Thailand) in April 1998. The agenda was to report on the state of Asian studies
in Asia, to reflect on how Asia was or might be studied in the region, and to con-
sider internationalisation in that context. On the last issue, the feeling was that
Asian Asianists needed first to establish their own sense of identity and common
purpose before taking a very active part in an internationalisation agenda which
was necessarily set elsewhere.
At our Hua Hin meeting there was agreement that we could usefully define
Asian studies, like any form of area studies, as an intensive multidisciplinary
study, sensitive to cultural difference, of a society other than our own. Nobody
doubted the extreme importance of this kind of study in the modern world, and
perhaps particularly in Asia, but differences of perspective abound once one takes
one’s stand in Asia. In most countries of Asia the only “other” languages widely
studied are those of Europe—English, French, German and Spanish. Australia,
and for special reasons Malaysia and Singapore, are the only countries in the
region where the modern foreign languages widely taught at the secondary level
include Asian ones. For Asian education systems, the principal “other” tradition
by which identities are defined is European civilisation, and the overwhelming
foreign language learned is English. It was always a sign of how much more
Edward Said knew about the West than about Asia that he could write in 1978 that

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

144 Anthony Reid

“no one is likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it [Orientalism] called Occi-

dentalism” (Said 1979, 50). Western studies in Japan are as old as Oriental studies
in Europe, as Professor Suehiro’s paper reminds us.3 Since Said wrote, Occi-
dentalism has flowered even more abundantly (see Tonnesson 1994; Carrier
1995).
While it was conceded that it was more difficult and problematic to perceive
“Asia” or “Asian studies” as a collective whole when standing at some particular
point within it, broader “imagined communities” were developing rapidly, stimu-
lating or at least legitimating broader-based Asian studies organisations. A recog-
nition of and ability to cope with otherness was suggested as fundamental to all
creative analysis, and interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches grounded
in fieldwork were ever more necessary as disciplines became more specialised
and theoretically impenetrable.
What we have in common as Asianists cannot be simply a particular geograph-
ical territory. Containing half the world’s population, and the majority of its
literary traditions and religious scriptures, this is too big and too incoherent a
slice of humanity to be contained in any kind of discipline. What we more use-
fully share is a commitment to the serious enterprise of understanding a culture
and tradition other than our own, through a variety of disciplinary techniques
which usually include language. This is not very different from the definition of
Asian studies given by the President of the 1983 ICANAS congress in Japan,
Professor Tatsuro Yamamoto—“to develop our understanding by trying to imagine
the standpoint which other persons are acting upon or observing” (Yamamoto
1984, 3).
So defined, those situated in Asia have no very good reason to exclude European
studies from the enterprise, especially as the expansion of English and the relative
retreat of other European languages from the world stage tends to disengage
continental Europe from world-dominant discourse in English. The same serious-
ness of linguistic and cultural engagement is demanded of a Japanese studying
French or Russian civilisation and society as of a European or an Indian studying
Japan. “Eurasian studies” might indeed be a more creative umbrella under which
to build a genuinely plural and balanced discipline of this sort. For the moment,
however, “Asia” is the umbrella we are stuck with, practically useful in building
non-European language and culture studies up to a more balanced position, and
ideologically useful as a challenge to the dominant paradigms in the established
disciplines.
The internationalisation of this Asian studies enterprise is not just a good thing
in general, or a trendy reflection of the globalisation of our times. It is an essential
aspect of our calling as brokers or boundary-crossers. Deep bilateral relations can
give rise to cross-cultural research of the highest order, but these relations are
frequently weighted with so much inherited inequality and distrust as to produce

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

 Studying “Asia” in Asia 145

a dialogue of the deaf. Consider for example the intellectual exchanges between
Britain and India, or between Japan and China. Rich as the mutual scholarship
between such pairings is, it badly needs the leaven of views from other quarters.
The effort to understand another culture and society from our own perspective
necessarily brings us closer to others seeking to understand the same culture
from a different perspective. Japanese and European scholarship on China
have been learning from each other for a century. Today fieldworkers comparing
notes in Indonesia or Vietnam, and the growth of international Thai studies
conferences meeting everywhere from Bangkok and Kunming to Amsterdam,
tend to build international communities for which English and the language of
the country studied are the necessary keys. A commitment to crossing one bound-
ary must entail a readiness to cross others, to listen to different perspectives in
different languages about the particular “other” which is the object of our study.
The more this happens the healthier area studies is, and the more likely it is to
present a pluralist debate which can interact helpfully with the insider discourse in
each country.
Of the many Asian traditions of Asian studies as I have defined it, it was the
Indian which first made an impact in the West because Indian scholars wrote
about “Indianised” Southeast Asia in English and in a manner accessible to Euro-
pean Orientalists. The enthusiasm of Indian scholars of the 1920s and 1930s was
expressed in the Greater India Society (1926), whose journal was inaugurated by
Rabindranath Tagore in 1934 with euphoric words about India’s past greatness,
its “radiant magnanimity which illumined the Eastern horizon” (see Casparis
1961, 129). As Giri Deshingkar shows in this issue, it arose more from a nation-
alist preoccupation with India than an interest in the other, and its emphatic
rejection by Southeast Asian nationalist scholarship led to its rapid postwar
demise. In its time, nevertheless, the work of Nilakanta Sastri, R. C. Majumdar,
H. Sarkar and others played a major part in the recovery of Southeast Asia’s early
history and civilisation (see, inter alia, Coomaraswamy 1921; Majumdar 1927 and
1937–38; Ray 1932; Sarkar 1932 and 1940).

ASIAN STUDIES IN JAPAN

Throughout this century, however, it is the Asian studies enterprise of Japan

which has been the most developed in Asia, and its differences from European
traditions are frequently extremely productive. Like Australia, Japan also has a
developed sense of Asia as some kind of whole because of the issue of whether,
or how, Japan is part of it. Early territorial concepts, unaware of any world outside
Asia, subdivided what was known into a tripartite universe between Japan itself,
the Middle Kingdom of China (kara or chugoku), and the source of Buddhism

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

146 Anthony Reid

in India (tenjiku). As early as 1708 the European term “Asia” had passed into
Japanese as a useful modern word for a continent, clearly excluding Europe and
differentiated from it (Suehiro [below]; Morris-Suzuki 1998, 6–7). By the nine-
teenth century this was widely used, and in 1905 Japan became one of the first
countries to organise a scholarly “Asia Society” (Ajia Gakkai) (Tanaka 1993, 234).4
The nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s, asserting Japan’s destiny to lead this
continent in a modern direction, embraced Ajia aggressively—with consequences
that made it suspect in China and elsewhere. But during the Meiji era another
word, toyo(eastern seas), had also become popular and approached in meaning
the western concept of Orient. It was specifically opposed to the West (seiyō)
somewhat as past was opposed to present or spirit was opposed to science. The
study of the history of this Orient, toyoshi, became the new scholarly basis for
understanding Japan’s past in relation to China, and as something different from
the West (Suehiro [below]; Tanaka 1993, 11–24). The prestigious Department of
Oriental History of Tokyo University (1897) trained most of Japan’s leading Sin-
ologists and later other specialists on eastern Asia. The Toyo Bunko, or Oriental
Library, was established in 1924 as a self-conscious assertion of Japan’s mastery of
Oriental knowledge on at least an equal basis with Europe and America (Suehiro
[below]; Tanaka 1993, 234–37).
Even more than for the US and Europe, World War II was a watershed for
Japan. The old classically-oriented scholarship focused on China and India respect-
ively was reorganised, with the Sinological Society, the Institute of Eastern Cul-
ture (Toho Gakkai) and the Japan Association of Indian and Buddhist Studies all
recreated on a strong pre-war base in 1949–51. Each of these associations now has
more than 1,500 members, and they were of course among the 41 organisations
which supported the ICANAS Congress in Japan. But where the scholars in these
older traditions were predominantly literary in orientation, not usually speaking
the modern languages of China or India, new streams developed after the war
with strong sympathies for the struggles of Japan’s neighbours. In the 1950s,
Marxism and opposition to the American alliance provided a basis for much
revisionist scholarship on China. In the 1960s, Southeast Asia became a focus
for many radical young Japanese scholars—partly because of its perceived
oppression in turn by European colonialism, Japanese militarism and American
hegemonism. For these younger scholars it was essential to empathise; to go
directly to the country in question, to learn its language and absorb its ambience,
with minimal interference from the academic tradition of east or west.
This Japanese version of “area studies”, chiiki kenkyu, developed first in the
Institute for Developing Economies (1957), and later in the Centre for Southeast
Asian Studies in Kyoto, which began in 1963 with some American (Ford Founda-
tion) input, but which soon evolved in a similar direction to the Institute for
Developing Economies. That direction was to emphasise total immersion in the

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

 Studying “Asia” in Asia 147

field, with a minimum of theoretical disciplinary alignment by western standards.

The emphasis was interdisciplinary and often collective, with a rather rich organ-
isational life of teams and study cells tackling each country or area. The approach
has produced some wonderful and inspiring results, known to non-Japanese
readers like myself through English translations of a series of outstanding works
on the development of rice agriculture systems (Hayami 1978; Ishii 1978; Tanabe
1994; Hayami and Tsubouchi 1989), Yumio Sakurai’s insightful work on Viet-
namese agricultural history (Sakurai 1976 and 1997),5 or Suehiro’s meticulous
study of Thailand’s corporations (Suehiro 1989). Because it so firmly resists the
self-absorbed theoretical trendiness which drives American social science, this
tradition is particularly refreshing for westerners. On the other hand, as Suehiro
has observed in a critical review of the subject, the benefits of this approach still
“leave us in a quandary in teaching students. What can we say besides ‘Go there
and learn’?” (Suehiro 1997)6.
I have dwelt on this Japanese tradition because its depth and strength makes
it the one which most patently requires outsiders to pay attention, and because
more of it is now available in English than is the case with Chinese or Korean
scholarship. The key problem of internationalising Asian studies, however,
remains. Is the task of internationalising to transfer as much as possible of the
internal dialogues of each language into English, or to become such polyglots
that we can cope adequately with the insights of scholarship in a multiplicity of
languages? The first route has no merit except practicality. It is undoubtedly
gaining in plausibility, as the Indian Prasenjit Duara or the Malaysian/Australian
Wang Gungwu, for example, teach us things about Chineseness that we would not
have seen from either purely western or purely Chinese discourse (Duara 1995;
Wang 1981). The fact that more and more Asian scholars do write perceptively
about other Asian countries in English makes internationalisation not just an
aspiration but a process. There remain appalling inequalities of access to what
we tend too glibly to call “international” discourse, and of power within it. But
this discourse, in Asian studies more obviously and necessarily than in any other
discipline, is at least plural, even if it must strive to be more so.

THE FUTURE OF ASIAN STUDIES

In this globalising world, is the profession of “Asian studies” caught in its own trap,
endorsing by its conferences, journals and associations a stereotyped exoticism
that ought to be consigned to an Orientalist past? Is the world converging in
communications terms so swiftly that our structures are becoming part of the
problem?

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

148 Anthony Reid

The Australian experience, which may have wider relevance, suggests other-
wise, for reasons which are explored more fully by Anthony Milner below. There
was a widespread view in the 1970s and 1980s, which I shared, that if we did our
job adequately as Asianists we should cease to exist as a separate discipline in any
sense. We sought to develop a genuinely balanced curriculum in history, geo-
graphy, political science and literature, in which “Asia” was simply a central and
dynamic part of the world we inhabit. The study of Asia should be “mainstreamed”
or “infused” into the core curriculum of every student in every discipline (see
Asian Studies Council 1988; Fitzgerald 1997). Yet despite much politically correct
rhetoric, and special government funding to help the process along, there are
fewer Asianists in Departments of History and Politics in Australia today than
there were 10–15 years ago.
The trend was driven in part by specific Australian factors—budget cuts, a
decline in humanities enrolments, and the consequent retreat to what is held to
be the intellectual core of Departments. The underlying cause, though, is a general
one which I believe is global in scale. In the social science and humanities dis-
ciplines which once served as windows to the diversity of the world, there is now
an alarming dominance of theory, in practice always North American-driven and
antithetic to regional expertise. Dethroning the canon of European classics written
by dead white males has led not to a courageously pluralist exploration of the
world’s cultural and social diversity, but to a new canon of self-referential theory.
Finally, there is globalisation, which now makes it possible to stay at home and
read Kompas or the Mainichi Shimbun in English on the net without much special-
ist study at all. Since Asians too are buying hamburgers and reading Foucault, do
we still need specialists to understand them?
That is the bad news, but the good news is more important. In Australia, Asian
languages have flourished—meaning especially Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian,
all now present in the majority of Australian universities and at least one of which
is taught in the majority of high schools. They are taught better, with more rapid
direct involvement in the society, than was the case when French and German
held sway. Secondly, Asian Studies Centres have proliferated, often built around
the teaching of languages and some associated “studies” courses. At least eight
new chairs in “Asian studies” have been created in Australia in the last 10 years.
Does this mean Asia has despite our intentions become more “other”, more
exotic and separate from the mainstream of our education and cognition? The
answer has to be an emphatic “no”. In all sorts of ways our young people do know
Asia far better than previous generations. They want to study the languages as the
indispensable key to another society, but they are combining this with getting
their meal tickets from disciplines far beyond the old core of history, politics,
literature and anthropology. Students approach Asia through law, architecture,
accounting and business studies, health sciences, psychology, fine arts, film and

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

 Studying “Asia” in Asia 149

almost every other field. Asianists in the social sciences and humanities have to
react imaginatively to this new situation if we are not to send people across the
cultural barrier with high skills but low understanding. Asian studies will flourish,
I feel confident, if we constantly redefine creatively and expansively what we
mean by it.
The reasons for this confidence can be summarised under three headings:

1. As Khoo Boo Teik explains in the important cases of Malaysia and

Singapore, Asians are discovering each other in a phase of global-
isation which encourages regionalism. In a manner parallel to many
anti-colonial nationalisms, the imagined communities first generated
by European colonisers or dreamers are having their most powerful
effects among the colonised. The “Asia” which for the Greeks was
centred in Asia Minor migrated steadily eastward, through the roman-
ticism of Tagore and Vivekenanda, until enthusiastically embraced
by Japanese nationalists. The 1993 Asian Human Rights forum in
Bangkok, and the ASEM annual dialogue between “Asia” and “Europe”
represent the cumbrous contemporary superstructure of these
imaginings, but Dr Khoo shows below a more durable base for them.
From an intellectual point of view one might argue that the most
important sub-groups of what I earlier called “Eurasian studies” might
be European studies, Slavic studies, Middle Eastern or West Asian
studies, South, Southeast, Northeast and Central Asian studies. These
are all more promising fora for genuine internationalisation in their
manageable environmental, intellectual and historical coherence. In
the long run it may be that international congresses will arise around
some of these foci, but in the shorter run the political obstacles
(everywhere except in Southeast Asia and Europe) to genuinely equal
and open discussions in these hot-houses of historical animosities are
substantial. Just because it is less coherent, “Asia” is less contested and
therefore useful as an intellectual site.
2. Among the reasons why Asian studies is being compartmentalised is
the tendency of the older social science and humanities disciplines
to become more theoretical, impenetrable to outsiders, and self-
referential. This process can be dangerous in a fast-changing world
constantly outrunning the ability of the academic world to speak
meaningfully to it. These developments make area studies operations
precious as reservoirs of cross-disciplinary new ideas fashioned out of
direct empirical contact with difference.
3. Asia will remain the most important source of otherness for the
dominant world culture in general. The debates over “Asian values”,

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

150 Anthony Reid

“Confucian ethic”, or “Islamic sociology” have already been of this

type—inadequate, essentialising attempts to select ideas from the rich
storehouse of “Asia” in the search for alternatives to the dominant
and often misguided world-culture. Plunging into this bank of experi-
ence will continue to provide the richest vein for understanding our-
selves, and stretching our ability to cope with the challenges of constant
change in the contemporary world.

NOTES
1
In presiding over the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, Max Muller defined
oriental scholars as “scholars who have shown that they are able, at least . . . to translate a text
that has not been translated before”—perhaps more culturally sensitising an entry ticket than
the mastery of modern theoretical jargon which has tended to replace it. Cited in A. L.
Basham. 1970. The International Congress of Orientalists. Abr-Nahrain 10: 8.
2
Dr Leitner, controversial President of the 1891 London Congress, cited in Basham (1970, 7).
3
The Japanese industry of western studies and especially western history (seiyoshi) has roots that
go back to the “Dutch Learning” (rangaku) of the Edo period.
4
Organised by Kurakichi Shiratori and Ryuzo Torii, this appears not to have become significant
enough to be listed below by Suehiro. The Toyo Gakkai (1886) was significantly older and
stronger.
5
This only represents, unfortunately, fragments of Sakurai’s work in Japanese.
6
In addition to this perceptive article, I have drawn for this section on the reports of Akira
Suehiro and Setsuho Ikehata to the Hua Hin ‘Asian Studies in Asia’ meeting of April 1998.

REFERENCES
Asian Studies Council. 1988. A national strategy for the study of Asia in Australia. Canberra:
Australian Government Publishing Service.
Basham, A. L. 1970. The international congress of Orientalists. Abr-Nahrain 10: 8.
Carrier, James G., ed. 1995. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Clarendon.
Coomaraswamy, A. K. 1921. History of Indian and Indonesian art. London.
de Casparis, J. G. 1961. Historical writing on Indonesia (early period). In Historians of South East
Asia, ed. D. G. E. Hall. London: Oxford University Press.
Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing history from the nation: Questioning narratives of modern China.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fitzgerald, Steven. 1997. Is Australia an Asian country? Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Hayami, Akira and Yoshihiro Tsubouchi, eds. 1989. Economic and demographic development in rice
producing societies: Some aspects of East Asian economic history, 1500–1900. Privately published.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

 Studying “Asia” in Asia 151

Hayami, Yujiro. 1978. Anatomy of a peasant economy: A rice village in the Philippines. Los Baños:
International Rice Research Institute.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Ishii, Yoneo. 1978. Thailand: A rice-growing society. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii for the
Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.
Majumdar, R. C. 1927. Ancient Indian colonies in the Far East. Lahore.
——. 1937–38. Suvarnadvipa. Dacca.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 1998. Invisible countries: Japan and the Asian dream. Asian Studies Review
22, no. 1: 5–22.
Ray, Nihar-Ranjan. 1932. Brahmanical gods in Burma. Rangoon.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Random Books.
Sakurai, Yumio. 1976. A study of landownership in some early nineteenth century Vietnamese
villages. Southeast Asia: History and Culture 6.
——. 1997. Peasant drain and abandoned villages in the Red River Delta between 1750 and
1850. In The last stand of Asian autonomies, ed. Anthony Reid: 133–52. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Sarkar, H. Bh. 1934. Indian influences on the literature of Java and Bali.
Sastri, K. A. Nilakanta. 1932. A Tamil merchant-guild in Sumatra. TBG 72: 314–27.
——. 1940. Sri Vijaya. BEFEO 40: 239–310.
Suehiro, Akira. 1989. Capital accumulation in Thailand, 1855–1985. Tokyo: Centre for East Asian
Cultural Studies.
——. 1997. Bodies of knowledge: How thinktanks have affected Japan’s postwar research on
Asia. Social Science Japan, February.
Tanabe, Shigehara. 1994. Ecology and practical technology: Peasant farming systems in Thailand.
Bangkok: White Lotus.
Tanaka, Stefan. 1993. Japan’s Orient: Rendering pasts into history. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Tonnesson, Stein. 1994. Orientalism, Occidentalism and knowing about others. NIASnytt, no. 2.
Wang, Gungwu. 1981. Community and nation: Essays on Southeast Asia and the Chinese. Singapore:
Heinemann.
Yamamoto, Tatsuro. 1984. Proceedings of the 31st International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia
and North Africa, Tokyo-Kyoto, 31 August–7 September 1983. Tokyo: Toho Gakkai.

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.