Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific

pacific studies/asian studies { Continued from front flap }

and

E duc ation s an d T he i r P u r p o s e s

goss

a c o n v e r s a t i o n a m o n g c u lt u r e s Edited by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock 2008, 488 pages cloth: isbn

978-0-8248-3160-8

Published in association with the East-West Philosophers Conference Education is the point of departure for the cultivation of human culture in all of its different forms. Although there are many contested conceptions of what is meant by a good education, there are few people who would challenge the premise that education is a good thing in which we should heavily invest. In this volume, representatives of different cultures and with alternative conceptions of human realization explore themes at the intersection of a changing world, the values we would choose to promote and embody, and the ways in which we educate the next generation.

Glob alization an d H i g h e r E d u c at i o n Edited by Jaishree K. Odin and Peter T. Manicas cloth: isbn

978-0-8248-2782-3; paper: isbn 978-0-8248-2826-4

Post-secondary education is a massive globalizing industry with a potential for growth that cannot be overestimated. By 2010 there will be 100 million people in the world, all fully qualified to proceed from secondary to tertiary education, but there will be no room left on any campus. A distinguished panel of scholars and educational administrators from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific was asked to speak on the complexities of globalized higher education from their positions of concern and expertise and then engage in a dialogue. The result is this timely and important work. Jacket design: Julie Matsuo-Chun

terence wesley-smith

is professor of geography and director of the Honors Program at the University of Hawai‘i. jon goss

ISBN 978-0-8248-3321-3

UNIVERSITY of HAWAI‘I PRESS Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888

90000

9 780824 833213 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

REMAKING AREA STUDIES

is associate professor and graduate chair at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i.

of related interest

TEACHING AND LEARNING ACROSS ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

To incorporateÂ�critical perspectives from the “areas studied,” chapters examine the development of area studies programs in Japan and the Pacific Islands. Not surprisingly, given the lessons learned from critical examinations of area studies in the U.S., there are competing, state, institutional, and intellectual perspectives involved in each of these contexts that need to be taken into account before embarking on interactive and collaborative area studies across Pacific Asia. Finally, area studies practitioners reflect on their experiences developing and teaching interactive, web-based courses linking classrooms in six universities located in Hawai‘i, Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, New Zealand, and Fiji. These collaborative on-line teaching and learning initiatives were designed specifically to address some of the conceptual and theoretical concerns associated with the production and dissemination of contemporary area studies knowledge. Multiauthored chapters draw useful lessons for international collaborative learning in an era of globalization, both in terms of their successes and occasional failures. Uniquely combining theoretical, institutional, and practical perspectives across the Asia Pacific region, Remaking Area Studies contributes to a rethinking and reinvigorating of regional approaches to knowledge formation in higher education.

wesley smith

REMAKING AREA STUDIES TEACHING AND LEARNING ACROSS ASIA AND THE PACIFIC 









edited by

Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss

This collection identifies the challenges facing area studies as an organized intellectual project in this era of globalization, focusing in particular on conceptual issues and implications for pedagogical practice in Asia and the Pacific. The crisis in area studies is widely acknowledged; various prescriptions for solutions have been forthcoming, but few have also pursued practical applications of critical ideas for both teachers and students. Remaking Area Studies not only makes the case for more culturally sensitive and empowering forms of area studies, but indicates how these ideas can be translated into effective student-centered learning practices through the establishment of interactive regional learning communities.� This pathbreaking work features original contributions from leading theorists of globalization and critics of area studies as practiced in the U.S. Essays in the first part of the book problematize the accepted categories of traditional area-making practices.�Taken together, they provide an alternative conceptual framework for area studies that informs the subsequent contributions on pedagogical practices. { Continued on back flap }

Remaking Area Studies

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Remaking Area Studies Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific

Edited by

Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

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© 2010 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 15╇ 14╇ 13╇ 12╇ 11╇ 10╅╇ 6╇ 5╇ 4╇ 3╇ 2╇ 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Remaking area studies : teaching and learning across Asia and the Pacific / edited by Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss. p.╇ cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3321-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1.╇ Asia—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States.â•… 2.╇ Pacific Area—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States.â•… 3.╇ Area studies—United States.â•… I.╇ Wesley-Smith, Terence.â•… II.╇ Goss, Jon D., 1960– DS32.9.U5R45 2010 950.071'1—dc22 2009052319 Publication of this book has been assisted by a grant from the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Designed by the University of Hawai‘i Press Production Staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction:╇ Remaking Area Studies Jon Goss╗and Terence Wesley-Smith

Part One:╇ Reshaping Area Studies in an Era of Globalization

1. Asia Pacific Studies in an Age of Global Modernity Arif Dirlik 2. Remapping Area Knowledge:╇ Beyond Global/Local Neil Smith 3. Locating Asia Pacific:╇ The Politics and Practice of.Global Division Martin W. Lewis

Part Two:╇ Perspectives from Asia and the Pacific







4. The Evolution of “Area Studies” in Japan:╇ The Impact of Global Context and Institutional Setting Lonny E. Carlile 5. The Development of Asia Pacific Studies:╇ A Case Study of Internationalization in Japanese Higher Education Jeremy Eades 6. For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda?╇ Specifying Pacific Studies Teresia K. Teaiwa 7. Institutional Collaborations:╇ People, Politics, Policy Lily Kong

Part Three:╇ Asia Pacific Learning Communities

8. Traveling Cultures:╇ Tourism and the Virtual Classroom in Hawai‘i and Singapore T.â•›C.â•›Chang, Jon Goss, and Christine R.â•›Yano

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9. Chinatown and the Virtual Classroom in Singapore and Hawai‘i Lisa Law and Jon Goss 10. Salaam Mānoa, Aloha Mindanao:╇ Creating a StudentCentered, Real-Time, Virtual Classroom Conrado Balatbat, Hezekiah Concepcion, Gerard Finin, and Ricardo Trimillos 11. E-Learning and the Remaking of Pacific Studies: An Evolutionary Tale Peter Hempenstall, Robert Nicole, and Terence Wesley-Smith

Epilogue:╇ Remaking Asia Pacific Studies Ricardo Trimillos About the Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments

This book brings together essays from participants in Moving Cultures:

Remaking Asia-Pacific Studies, a project of the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies (SHAPS) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, that promoted collaborative research and interactive learning communities in two phases from 1997 to 2002. Financial support for the project came from two generous grants from the Ford Foundation, provided as part of its Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies program. We wish to thank the responsible program officer, Toby Volkman, and other staff members at the Ford Foundation for the wonderful opportunities the grants provided. We also want to thank SHAPS dean Willa Tanabe, who initiated the initial grant application, and her successor, Edgar Porter, for their constant support and encouragement for Moving Cultures activities. Terence Wesley-Smith would also like to acknowledge the support of then director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, Robert Kiste, who allowed him to take time away from other duties in the center to direct the SHAPS-wide Moving Cultures project. Moving Cultures involved many participants at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Kapi‘olani Community College, University of the South Pacific, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, National University of Singapore, Victoria University of Wellington, Canterbury University, Ateneo de Zamboanga University, and Palau Community College. The participants are too numerous to mention individually, but many of the faculty members involved are featured in this book as authors or co-authors of chapters. We want to thank them all sincerely for their collegiality as well as their willingness to take on extra work, share ideas, and take risks. We would also like to thank the many students who participated in the learning communities, who also had to work vii

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hard, share their ideas, and take risks in cyberspace interactions. We hope all of you have found the journey as stimulating as we have. Finally, we would like to thank Patricia Crosby, executive editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, and two anonymous external reviewers for their excellent comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. We are sure they will recognize their contributions in this new and improved version of the book, but of course we bear full responsibility for any errors or omissions. Terence Wesley-Smith Jon Goss

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Introduction

Remaking Area Studies Jon Goss and Terence Wesley-Smith

It is widely acknowledged that area studies, the dominant academic institu-

tion in the United States for research and teaching on America’s overseas “others,” is in the thralls of a fiscal and epistemological crisis. The prevailing mood of anxiety and uncertainty dates from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. At stake is the perceived relevance of area studies knowledge in a new, more intense phase of globalization characterized by diffuse challenges to the dominance of American economic and political power and the apparent erosion of the conceptual and spatial boundaries with which area studies constructed its objects and defended its institutional identity. As an effective collaborator in an American-led process of globalization, area studies could be seen as a victim of its own success. Yet it is now quite apparent that the triumphant mood surrounding the end of the Cold War and what Roland Robertson calls “the compression of the world” was premature (Robertson 1992, 8). Whatever the new era brings, it does not signal the end of history, famously defined by Francis Fukuyama as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of€human government” (Fukuyama 1992). Alternative ways of knowing and living in the world continue to be vigorously asserted despite—or even because of—globalization’s universalizing demands. Nor does the borderless world favored by the corporate champions of globalization seem likely to eventuate anytime soon. As Arjun Appadurai points out, while this new world is characterized by the increasing mobility of objects, it nevertheless remains one “of structures, organizations, and other stable social forms” (Appadurai 2001, 5). The central object in the architecture of area studies, the sovereign territorial state, has not withered away despite the increased speed and volume of flows of capital, technology, information, and labor and the emergence of new regional and global instruments ix

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of economic and political organization. Even if conservative commentator Charles KrauthamÂ�mer (1990/91) is correct to claim we are living through a “unipolar moment” in the history of the international system, it remains a system of nation-states. And it is a world where American power is increasingly challenged by the rising influence of other states, particularly in the dynamic Asia Pacific region, including China and India (Little 2000, 53–56). Certainly, globalization draws attention to, and perhaps intensifies, geographical and sociocultural heterogeneity within states and regions, challenging conventional conceptions of “areas” upon which the area studies project has been based. Nevertheless, this is still an era when understanding the world requires understanding the specificity of the local, broadly defined as the dynamic interaction of culture and place, within the context of global change. This volume presents some critical theoretical insights regarding the role of area studies as an organized intellectual project in an era of globalization, and it explores the implications of these ideas for everyday curriculum development and teaching practices. It does so with particular reference to issues and practices in area studies programs focused on Asia and the Pacific. The book also provides some points of comparison for American area studies by examining the development of equivalent programs in Japan, as well as making space for Pacific Islands Studies, an often overlooked segment of the Asia Pacific field of scholarship. There are numerous works tracing the development of area studies and analyzing its current crisis (see e.g., Szanton 2004a; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002; Ludden 2000; Dirlik 1998; Lewis and Wigen 1997; Heginbotham 1994). Remaking Area Studies is one of the few that also suggests some practical applications of these ideas for area studies teachers and students. The contributors share a commitment to the critical importance of locality in a world increasingly seen as “flat” (Friedman 2005), as well as a deep-seated unease about the way area studies knowledge continues to be produced and disseminated in the American academy. In this introduction, we make the case for more empowering forms of area studies, and contributors elsewhere in the volume explore how these ideas might be translated into effective student-centered learning practices through the establishment of interactive regional learning communities.

Origins The institutional history of area studies is related directly to the international interests of the United States, which expanded rapidly in the decades after World War II. University-based language and area studies programs emerged

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in response to the perceived need for useful knowledge about the non-Western places and people Americans increasingly encountered as military analysts, policy makers, business leaders, and private citizens (Hall 1947). The intensifying global confrontation with the Soviet Union gave this type of knowledge considerable strategic significance and provided the primary rationale for the deployment of extensive resources by government agencies and private foundations (Szanton 2004b). Bruce Cumings notes the “often astonishing levels of collaboration between the universities, the foundations, and the intelligence arms of the American state” in the development and operation of area studies programs in the postwar decades (Cumings 2002, 262). Area studies programs were often heavily dependent upon support from private foundations and government agencies, giving the field an opportunistic bent compared to many other parts of the academy. More important, direct ties to centers of economic and political power helped determine the objects of study, the type of knowledge to be generated, and even the methods of inquiry to be employed, leading to a dominance of the field of study by realist political science and development economics. The basic building blocks of area studies were sovereign states. This was hardly surprising, since area studies was born into a decolonizing world increasingly composed of these political entities (Ludden 2000, 11). Decolonization represented a profound shift from an antagonistic world of colonial empires structured by ideas of civilization, superiority, and race to a formally symmetrical world of nation-states informed instead by notions of universal human rights, freedoms, and needs—as well as novel ideas about economic and political development. As John Kelly and Martha Kaplan argue, this remarkable transition was engineered to reflect a new vision of world order promoted by the United States, the principal architect of a range of influential multilateral institutions, including the United Nations. The new vision emphasized untrammeled access to overseas resources and “free” trade rather than imperial acquisition of territory, and economic aid rather than pre-emptive military action. This was to be a peaceful world based on the normalization of the nation-state—“the natural choice of every people modern and free, past, present, and future”—its precepts and protocols continually reinforced through international pressures of one sort or another (Kelly and Kaplan 2001, 20). It is difficult to overstate the importance of this fundamental characteristic of the field of inquiry. This was an academic enterprise that took as its basic unit of analysis territories that were often the relatively recent product of European imperialism and contained within their boundaries a bewildering variety of social, economic, and cultural forms. Wedded to Euro-American

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conceptions of the nation-state and progress and to the comparative approach in which “Western civilization” was the normative case, area studies projected the differences within sovereign states and areas they constituted onto the boundaries between them. This state-centered approach often reinforced a static view of culture and geography and the interrelationship between the two. The areas to be studied tended to be viewed “as relatively immobile aggregates of traits, with more or less durable historical boundaries and with a unity composed of more or less enduring properties” (Appadurai 2001, 7). Area studies posited the other as somehow beyond—or more usually “behind” in the developmental sense—the political-economic and sociocultural structures of modernity, effectively denying the coexistence of multiple complex modernities, including forms alternative or resistant to the EuroAmerican project (Dirlik 1997, 12; Mirsepassi, Basu, and Weaver 2003, 12; Harootunian 2002, 164). From the beginning, area studies was an integral part of a modernist project that sought to remake the world in the image of the West, and, as David Ludden points out, it assumed “the power of national states to define territories of culture and history” (Ludden 2000, 1). The type of knowledge considered useful, at least by the funding agencies, was not the kind produced in research on the classical languages and literatures of Asia, the Middle East, or Africa, which was already part of the university establishment in the form of Oriental Studies. Rather, knowledge was to be generated and applied toward an understanding of the processes of modern social change, particularly state building and economic development. Ultimately, all this was viewed through the lens of American economic, political, and strategic interests in particular parts of the world. “Area” was the essential and sometimes the only organizing concept in this branch of the American academy. What this meant in practice was some sort of assemblage of disparate discipline-based interests. Although the situation varied from program to program and over time, core faculty members typically included the dominant economists and political scientists, supported by historians and anthropologists and sometimes joined by other specialists in literature or the performing arts. Although this arrangement provided institutionalized space for sometimes useful cross-disciplinary conversations, it is clear that the more ambitious goal of creating new, interdisciplinary forms of scholarship was not realized to any great extent (Hall 1947). Most practitioners continued to apply discipline-based approaches and methods in their studies of particular areas, and integration, where it occurred at all, happened only after the research work was done, when individual essays or reports were brought together in multidisciplinary collections.

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By the end of the 1980s and after more than forty years of scholarly production, it was clear that area studies had played a major role in raising awareness among Americans about other parts of the world. Some area studies scholars, for example Benedict Anderson, James C. Scott, and Clifford Geertz, also had a significant theoretical influence in the social sciences and humanities. Yet there was no substantial body of theory identified with area studies (rather than with the disciplines that made up its component parts), no distinctive approach to inquiry, and no particular methodology that practitioners could call their own.1

Signs of Crisis The dramatic shifts in the global political landscape of the late 1980s revealed the intellectual and economic vulnerability of the area studies establishment. The end of the Cold War simultaneously reduced the strategic significance of national and regional boundaries and facilitated the rise of a new discourse of globalization. As David Ludden (2000, 12) points out, what changed in the 1990s was not so much the fact of globalization, although the velocity and intensity of global economic, social, and cultural transactions were clearly accelerating. More important was the emergence of a neoliberal ideology that recognized globalization as a central historical process, necessitating the development of new economic and political institutions as well as new forms of knowledge about the world. With an academic rationale closely tied to the fate of sovereign states and apparently outmoded conceptions of political and economic development, area studies as an institution was increasingly hardpressed to respond to demands for knowledge informed by transnational or even postnational concerns. The first manifestations of the crisis in area studies were economic. Federal funding for area studies had been in decline since before the end of the Cold War, but the trend dramatically accelerated with the rise of fiscal conservatism in the 1990s (see Koppel 1995), and private funding agencies, including the Social Science Research Council and the Mellon, MacArthur, and Ford foundations, began to adjust to the new “global” environment and rethink their long-standing commitment to the field. This turn of events also revived old academic rivalries in which some argued that scholars based in the traditional disciplines were just as well-placed to throw light on local phenomena as those in area studies departments, while others advocated universal approaches to inquiry, such as those based on rational choice theory, that simply denied the need for any specialized area-based knowledge in the new world order. In response to the new interest in globalization, some colleges

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and universities established global or international studies programs that competed with area studies for funding, students, and scholarly credibility. Area studies also faced new intellectual challenges. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed experimentation and rethinking in the social sciences and humanities that left few parts of the academy untouched. Increasingly influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and others, scholars began to raise new questions about connections between knowledge and power and to examine the epistemological foundations of the modernist project itself. Postcolonialism and postmodernism gained ground and new “critical” interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary institutional sites were created, including women’s studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. Particularly significant was the intellectual consolidation of cultural studies, which began to steal some of area studies’ thunder by tackling critical issues associated with the globalization of America’s others, such as diaspora, transnationalism, and the hybridization of popular culture. These fields repudiated essentialized notions of identity in favor of mobility and border crossing (Dirlik 1997, 6), thus destabilizing, if not dissolving, the cultural and geographic boundaries upon which area studies depends. Furthermore, these were academic programs that, unlike area studies, quickly developed literatures that were critical, deeply reflexive, and genuinely interdisciplinary. It is instructive to note that Orientalism, Edward Said’s seminal work, had its major impact outside of the area studies establishment, despite its direct implications for that intellectual enterprise (Harootunian 2002, 151–153). Area studies responded to its fiscal crisis by diversifying its sources of funding. H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi (2002), for example, note a dramatic rise in Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese support for Asian Studies programs in the United States. Boosted also by an increase in federal funding after the terrorist attacks of 2001, especially for “less commonly taught languages,” such as those of the Middle East, the overall quantity of resources flowing to area studies programs has thus been maintained or, in some cases, increased. However, this has required that the area studies establishment be willing to follow the cash, continuing a tendency whereby external agendas modify or override internal rationales framed in academic or conceptual terms. Indeed, of paramount concern is the continuing absence of any coherent conceptual basis for this academic endeavor. As Ludden puts it, “There is no theory of area studies or area-specific knowledge; there is only a set of institutional, personal, and fragmented disciplinary, market, and professional interests that converge primarily on funding” (Ludden 2000, 17). Similarly, Harootunian and Miyoshi challenge us to “explain why funding is more important than thinking through the reason for funding.” For them, the

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result is an “unexamined compulsion to continue and repeat” an outmoded set of practices in teaching and research (Harootunian and Miyoshi 2002, 5–7). Without a stronger sense of the intellectual underpinnings of the enterprise, not least its distinctive epistemological claims, how can area studies practitioners justify and defend their existing role in the academy, let alone plan the further development of the field?

(Re)thinkingâ•—Area Studies Despite its numerous shortcomings, the essential mission of the area studies enterprise—the systematic production of knowledge about other places and peoples—is as relevant today as ever. Indeed, if anything its significance increases as globalization entangles all human populations in new and increasingly complex ways. These entanglements within global flows of capital, people, and ideas are site- and situation-specific and, to be fully understood, require the understanding of cultural and historical contexts that area studies has always been well-equipped to produce. However, there are several significant obstacles to be overcome before area studies can hope to re-establish its relevance to the academy and other constituencies. A long history of complicity with the national security project is among the most intractable of the many issues affecting area studies today. Policy linkages provided the primary rationale for the institutionalization of area studies in the first place, and practitioners continue to face issues of scholarly ethics or integrity as a result. Recent military forays into Afghanistan and Iraq have clearly increased the demand for all kinds of experts in these areas, and the Bush administration’s “war on terror” boosted government funding for foreign language and area studies training. Of course, the issue of academic independence is not as clear-cut as it might appear. As Bruce Cumings points out, academic luminaries such as Paul Baran, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Sweezy worked in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. For Cumings, such service by scholars can be justified by the level of threat faced by the society at the time, but ideally it should be conducted outside the academy. Under less extreme circumstances, Cumings sees “nothing particularly wrong with scholars offering their views on policy questions, so long as the practice is not openly or subtly coerced by funding agencies and does not require security clearance.” (Cumings 2002, 263–264; 289–290). If area studies programs have always had direct ties to foreign policy and security establishments, they have also been closely associated with the generation and dissemination of alternative, often dissenting, perspectives on America’s overseas adventures (Szanton 2004b). The Bulletin of Concerned

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Asian Scholars (now Critical Asian Studies), for example, was launched in 1969 to voice opposition to the “brutal aggression of the United States in Vietnam.” Its founders argued, “Those in the field of Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their research and the political posture of their profession,” which they described as a “complicity of silence” (BCAS 1969). These arguments have obvious relevance for contemporary applications of United States military power in conflict situations in the Middle East and elsewhere. There is an equally important need for alternative perspectives to the U.S.centric discourse of globalization (see Goss and Yue 2005; Gibson-Graham 2005). Undoubtedly, certain economic, political, and cultural concepts and practices have increasingly universal application, but even “McDonaldization” and “Disneyization” are contradictory hybridizing processes, and they hardly herald a New World Order, the End of History, or the flattening of the earth, as various teleological accounts would have it.

Area Studies Inside-Out Perhaps the most pressing need is for area studies practitioners to use their particular skills and resources to confront the pervasive realities of globalization in new and interesting ways. One attractive alternative requires moving the focus away from state-centered projects of modernization and development, and engaging with what Appadurai calls “grassroots globalization” or “globalization from below” (Appadurai 2001, 16–20). This represents a profound shift in current practices with several different dimensions. First, it requires modification of the present institutional architecture of area studies, which privileges relations between world regions and global centers of political and economic power and encourages a static, bounded view of areas and identities, consistent with “a Cold War-based geography of fear and competition” (Appadurai 2001, 8). At the very least this involves an increased awareness on the part of area studies practitioners of the constructed and contingent nature of the “areas” that frame their work, and a willingness to cross received conceptual and institutional , as well as geographical, boundÂ� aries where necessary and appropriate. A second shift involves the content of area studies research and teaching. The area studies agenda is often dominated by issues and problems that reflect the economic or security concerns of external actors and agencies, particularly those of state and corporate elites. There is certainly a place for such top-down and outside-in approaches and perspectives. But it is also appropriate to de-center area studies to apprehend the “grassroots” reality of

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the majority of ordinary people in other societies, particularly the everyday basis of their ways of life. One way of doing that is through an engagement with the local production, dissemination, and consumption of music, film, dance, and other forms of popular culture. Another is through engagement with the local initiatives organized around natural resources and productive activities, both rooted in local cultural ecologies and linked with the global political and cultural economies. Such an approach promises encounters with sites of resistance and human creativity that often belie the inevitability that characterizes much globalization discourse. The third shift is at the level of epistemology and is by far the most difficult to achieve. In the post–Cold War era, there has been much talk of internationalizing education, including its area studies dimensions. But, as Appadurai notes, this often takes the form of inviting diasporic others to join existing area studies establishments—but only on Western epistemological and ontological terms. Western ways of knowing and ideas about “progress” have become privileged to a degree that non-Western and indigenous knowledge is often portrayed as quaint or unscientific, certainly marginal and irrelevant in a modernizing and globalizing world. Postcolonial studies and indigenous studies have shown that the problem lies not only in how knowledge about other peoples and places is used, but in how that knowledge is constructed and reproduced in the first place. Imbalances of power are not just geopolitical and geoeconomic, they are embedded in the very language of modernization, development, and now globalization, from whence they have become a part of area studies itself. New forms of area studies that take ideas of internationalization and democratization seriously must find space for the other ways of knowing and living in the world that continue to shape the day-to-day lives of most inhabitants of the planet.

Moving Cultures These were some of the ideas that informed an initiative of the University of Hawai‘i’s School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies called Moving Cultures: Remaking Asia-Pacific Studies.2 The initiative was funded by the Ford Foundation from 1997 to 2002 as part of a larger effort to “revitalize” area studies in light of what program officer Toby Volkman called “a dramatically changed and increasingly interconnected world.” According to Volkman, the in-depth knowledge of particular places that area studies has always produced was still needed, but it was now important to revisit the field’s “basic premises and procedures.” Among other things, this involved questioning “the notion of distinct and stable areas, with congruent cultural,

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linguistic, and geographical identities,” and finding new ways to understand how local “identities and cultures are being formed and re-formed” in their interactions with powerful global forces (Volkman 1999).3 Stage I of our Moving Cultures project responded to Volkman’s challenge with a one-year collaborative research and instructional project focused on the Republic of Palau, a Pacific island microstate increasingly affected by flows of workers, tourists, and investment capital from Asia. The intent was to defy conventional approaches to area studies by destabilizing the spatial, cultural, and geopolitical categories often used to organize such work. The Moving Cultures project brought together an interdisciplinary team of specialists in various Asian and Pacific “areas” as well as politicians, community leaders, academics, and teachers from Palau who would not normally work together on a sustained basis. This was a highly unusual approach to Asia Pacific studies, and one that responded to the challenge that “moving cultures” presented to notions of the “local” in an era of globalization (WesleySmith 2000a). Although the first iteration of Moving Cultures produced some interesting insights into Palauan experiences of globalization and generally raised awareness of area studies issues, some aspects of the project were less successful. A key objective was to find ways to correct some of the power imbalances between the agents (researchers and students) and objects of inquiry (studied communities) inherent in much area studies work by making our Moving Cultures activities “genuinely collaborative.” By the time Stage I was complete, however, we were just beginning to understand the enormity of this task. Although many Palauan colleagues participated in the project, the extent to which this served to “level the playing field” is by no means clear. In an important cultural and epistemological sense it was still “our” game, played out according to the dictates and conventions of Western scholarship. We were effectively engaged in “a search for balance within a discourse that is itself thoroughly unbalanced in its approach to the world, already firmly committed to a particular intellectual tradition and ontology” (Wesley-Smith 2000b, 9).

Regional Learning Communities Responding to these dilemmas, the emphasis in Stage II of Moving Cultures shifted from research activities to the classroom, the principal site where the culture of area studies is reproduced. In a concerted effort to “bring area studies to the areas studied,” a team of instructors from the University of Hawai‘i established relations with six other regional colleges and universities

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to explore new forms of collaborative teaching and learning about Asia and the Pacific. What emerged from these interactions was a pedagogical model designed to address some of the imbalances of power inherent in area studies. The model advocates the use of interactive technologies to create dynamic links between places where area studies are taught and the places being studied, and so to destabilize the relationship between the subject and object of knowledge. In this model the partner educational institutions collaborate in the development of shared curriculum and adopt student-centered, dialogic forms of teaching and learning in multisited classrooms. In other words, it forms regional learning communities.4 Such learning communities were developed in multiple collaborations between faculty and students at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, Canterbury and Victoria universities in New Zealand, Ateneo de Zamboanga University in Mindanao in the Philippines, the National University of Singapore, and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. Jointly owned courses or course modules were developed and taught simultaneously on the partner campuses using interactive technologies such as e-mail, websites, and videoconferencing to link participants at each site (see also Sharma 2005; Chang 2004). The interactive courses explored the nature and local implications of the global flows of capital, people, and ideas that affect local communities in different ways. Modules were developed to examine three sets of related topics associated with globalization: migration and multiculturalism; tourism, representation, and identity; and globalization and popular culture. These are topics of immediate relevance to people in each of the regional sites, which as quintessential border zones exhibit all the tensions and contradictions inherent in the contemporary study of place and culture. The pedagogy is designed to give students an active role in shaping and exploring the topics in close collaboration with overseas counterparts and to elicit personal experiences and comparative perspectives. Although one project (involving Ateneo de Zamboanga University) pursued semester-long interactions, others found that the most practical approach employed a scaled-down version of the Moving Cultures pedagogical model focused on specially designed modules inserted into longer courses taught independently on the collaborating campuses. Needless to say there are differences in educational and institutional cultures that make such distanced collaborations difficult to sustain over a longer term, and the four-to-fiveweek modules could be tailor-made to fit into regular courses that satisfied location-specific requirements without necessitating new course proposals,

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special funding, and personnel actions. Inserting interactive modules into existing courses also avoided the potential problem of recruiting students for courses that are not part of the regular offerings. Finally, limiting the period of intercampus activity avoided some of the planning and management difficulties associated with regional campuses following different academic calendars.

Re-Placingâ•—Asia Pacific Studies Most of the contributions in this volume started life as papers presented at the Moving Cultures capstone conference Remaking Asia Pacific Studies: Knowledge, Power, and Pedagogy, held in Honolulu in December 2002. The chapters are organized into three sections, intended to move the reader from theoretically informed general discussions of the development and current status of area studies, through some comparative perspectives from outside the mainstream of American area studies, to case studies of attempts to translate such critical insights into concrete teaching and learning practices. These sections are followed by some concluding comments from Ricardo Trimillos, who identifies emerging themes and “lessons learned” from the materials presented in the book. Each section is prefaced by a brief introduction, which situates the set of chapters in the context of the broader concerns of the text and identifies relevant theoretical and practical considerations. The three chapters in the first section, “Reshaping Area Studies in an Era of Globalization,” explore some of the factors shaping the development of area studies knowledge in the United States, as well as the shifting regional geographies on which area studies programs are based. Together they highlight the need for radical change in the pedagogies and practices of area studies, without losing sight of the valuable insights that this type of scholarship can provide. Arif Dirlik identifies a number of political-economic developments shaping the crisis in area studies, with particular reference to Asia Pacific studies, before discussing alternative ways of reimagining regional geographies and issues. He notes in particular the significance of the end of the Cold War for the modernization discourse and spatial categories that emerged in the post–World War II period. Coupled with the rise of new centers of global power, this has destabilized some fundamental aspects of the area studies project and given rise to a number of alternative ways of claiming knowledge about Asia and the Pacific. Dirlik discusses the distinctive characteristics of these overlapping trends—identified as civilization studies, oceanic studies, the “Asianization of Asian studies,” diasporic studies, and indigenous studies—before concluding that no single approach is likely to

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meet all the needs of more appropriate forms of area studies while avoiding complicity with the neoliberal ideology of globalization. “If there is a crisis in our ways of studying the world, including the Asia Pacific world,” he asks, “is this crisis likely to be resolved by the substitution of a new paradigmâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›or does the solution lie in the proliferation of paradigms in a world that does not lend itself to easy spatial or temporal containment?” Neil Smith’s contribution focuses on issues of space and scale in the production of the geographical categories informing area studies. He notes that the “whole global jigsaw puzzle” of spatial entities around which this type of knowledge has been constructed has been thrown up in the air in recent times. The challenge is to put the puzzle back together in more appropriate ways while recognizing that some of the pieces coming back down have been altered or replaced under the influence of globalization and other social forces. For Smith, the key is understanding the processes involved. He asks, “how do certain kinds of areas and borders get constructed, others eroded, still others reconstructed in the context of specific, shifting and intensified transnational flows associated with a new globalism?” Smith draws upon theoretical insights from the discipline of geography and concludes that a revitalized and reconstructed area studies will succeed “to the extent that it does indeed embrace geographical theory and, in particular, theories of the production of space and scale.” Martin Lewis echoes some of the themes in the Smith and Dirlik contributions, although employing different arguments and emphases. His work is organized around a critical examination of different metageographical schemes used to divide the world into civilizational, continental, and oceanic realms. He also examines various constructs of “Asia” and “the Pacific” before outlining the requirements for an alternate regionalization scheme to inform area studies. He argues that the discourse of competing civilizations and that of continents share common historical and intellectual roots, both grounded in ideas of immutable physical, cultural, social, and economic features. Oceans too, he suggests, are often incorrectly seen as simple, natural units of geography, self-evident points of reference for dividing up the world. Lewis argues that area studies cannot simply discard regional categories, problematic as they are. Instead, we need to use them in ways that acknowledge their complexity as well as their contingent and constructed nature, while entertaining “alternative, overlapping, noncongruent regionalization schemes, paying particular attention to dynamic border zones.” While Dirlik, Smith, and Lewis discuss broad issues affecting contemporary American-based area studies programs, in “Perspectives from Asia and the Pacific” Lonny Carlile, Jeremy Eades, Teresia Teaiwa, and Lily Kong shift

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the focus to related concerns and issues in some of the areas studied. Lonny Carlile and Jeremy Eades examine trends in area studies and internationalization in higher education in Japan, an important site for the production of knowledge about the Asia Pacific region. Carlile traces the evolution of the study of Japan’s “others” from the nineteenth century on and looks at how changing geopolitical considerations and institutional reforms have shaped contemporary forms of international study. He describes the early and wholesale adoption of Western scientific modes of inquiry in higher education in Japan—initially leading researchers to view even their own culture as “other.” In more recent times the status of area studies research and education has changed dramatically as Japan has been confronted with the new demands of globalization and become obliged to adopt a more independent and assertive regional posture. Although Carlile argues that Japan is now in a position to forge models of area studies research and teaching radically different from those of the United States, Eades’ analysis suggests that this is not necessarily the case. He examines the situation at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), a new institution where area studies is not just a supplement to other programs, but “the raison d’être of a whole university.” This represents a radical departure for Japanese higher education, and, unencumbered by existing precedents and institutional constraints, APU appears to offer enviable opportunities for innovation. However, as Eades explains, there are real constraints stemming from the fact that the initiative was designed primarily to attract students in a shrinking and competitive domestic market and to tap into an expanding flow of international students from other parts of the Asia Pacific region. Eades is well aware of the conceptual and political issue associated with the construction of regions raised by other contributors to this volume. Indeed he explores in some depth the origins of the Asia Pacific idea, as well as some of the regional issues that might feature prominently in the university’s curriculum. Yet ultimately his concerns are pragmatic and administrative: “Amoeba-like regions and open-ended disciplines raise serious implications for teaching and library resources, especially in small international universities whose composition may change rapidly in response to the vicissitudes of the regional economy.” Teresia Teaiwa has also been involved in program building at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, a country with strong historical, cultural, geopolitical, and diasporic ties to the Pacific islands region. She notes that over the last half-century Pacific Islands Studies has produced vast quantities of material but has demonstrated no disciplinary or methodological consistency. She shares the concerns of other area studies practitioners,

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including Eades, about the challenges of studying “amoeba-like” regions that expand or shrink over time and according to the nature of the inquiry. She acknowledges that as it is usually defined “the Pacific” is a construct with distinctly colonial origins, but she points out that the same might be said about any modern Pacific island nation. In the end, Teaiwa follows Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa in arguing that whatever the conceptual and practical legacies of colonialism, only Pacific islanders “can make our region real.” Teaiwa’s chapter offers a prescriptive answer to the question “What is Pacific Studies?” that emphasizes interdisciplinarity, indigenous ways of knowing, and comparative analysis before warning of the dangers of associating too closely with a potentially hegemonic Asian studies. As a complement to the critical concerns of earlier contributors, Lily Kong of the National University of Singapore takes a pragmatic look at some of the administrative factors affecting institutional collaboration, especially those initiatives involving international partners. The most important factors in the success of such projects, she argues, are personal commitment and the development of interpersonal relations between faculty members who are willing to invest time and effort to overcome professional disincentives and institutional barriers. These are important practical issues that reappear in the chapters about learning communities later in the volume. In the third section of the book, “Asia Pacific Learning Communities,” collaborators reflect on their experiences developing and teaching interactive Web-based courses, initiatives designed specifically to address some of the conceptual and theoretical concerns about contemporary area studies raised earlier in this volume. These chapters thus represent attempts to bring the insights of what might be called the “intellectual heavyweights” in the first section to bear on the classroom-based construction and dissemination of area studies knowledge. Each collaboration involved a different variation of the Moving Cultures model of pedagogy and generated a wealth of experience with the conceptual, technical, political, cultural, and bureaucratic issues associated with this sort of educational innovation. It is hardly surprising that some of these interregional, cross-cultural experiments were more successful than others for both students and instructors. Taken together, the case studies provide useful lessons on the potential and practical problems of international collaborative learning intended to engage in “moving cultures.” Finally, Ricardo Trimillos offers a concise “idiosyncratic” reflection on the materials in this volume and on the future of Asia Pacific area studies generally. Like many other authors in Remaking Area Studies, Trimillos grapples with the challenge of defining fundamental units of analyses, in this case the Asia Pacific region and its constituent subregional parts. He explores

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this issue with particular reference to the organization and reorganization of Asian and Pacific studies at the University of Hawai‘i, distinguishing between “working definitions” (employed by primary user groups), and “workable definitions” (invoked for specific purposes or occasions), and identifying some associated conceptual, political, and practical considerations. An experienced area studies administrator and teacher, Trimillos welcomes Moving Cultures’ focused attention on issues of pedagogy and knowledge delivery, applied and practical aspects of area studies that he argues deserve more attention from specialists. Trimillos discusses some of the shared characteristics of the collaborative initiatives described in the book, particularly their emphasis on student-centered, experiential learning. But he notes that the effectiveness of these initiatives for “mastering specific knowledge orâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›raising levels of critical thinking” remains unexplored. Trimillos concludes by enumerating eight “lessons learned” from this attempt to rethink Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Hawai‘i and argues that these “have a high degree of application and relevance” for programs focused on other areas of the world.

Area Studies Futures We believe that there is much to be learned from Moving Cultures and other recent initiatives that confront the assumptions and practices governing the first half-century of area studies in the United States. There is much at stake as an accelerating process of globalization, itself poorly understood, continues to challenge conventional understandings of place and culture. There is no option but to continue the search for viable alternatives to an area studies establishment that has, at best, only a dimly conceived sense of its intellectual role in the academy. We continue to hope with Arjun Appadurai that while the vision of “global collaborative teaching and learning about globalization may not resolve the great antinomies of power that characterize this worldâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›it might help even the playing field” (Appadurai 2001, 20).

Notes 1.╇ Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, most area studies scholarship was informed by the ideas and assumptions of the modernization theorists, with their emphasis on stages of growth and the global diffusion of modernity, or in more critical works by dependency theory, which emphasized instead relations of power between developed centers and underdeveloped peripheries in the global system. 2.╇ Some material related to the Moving Cultures project in this and other sections has been drawn from Wesley-Smith 2000a and 2000b. The School of Hawaiian,

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Asian and Pacific Studies (SHAPS) is now the School of Pacific and Asian Studies (SPAS)—see Ricardo Trimillos’ essay elsewhere in this volume. 3.╇ Ford received more than two hundred applications from colleges and universities across the United States for Stage I of the Crossing Borders initiative (1997–1998), and thirty were funded. The following year Stage I recipients were invited to apply for Stage II funding (1999–2002), and eighteen received support. Recipients included the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, University of Wisconsin, Yale University, and the University of Michigan. The initiative sponsored a great variety of projects, some of which, like Duke’s Oceans Connect, explored new conceptual frameworks, while others, such as Michigan’s Grounding, Translation and Expertise, attempted to encourage transdisciplinary and transarea collaborations within the institution. Moving Cultures was one of a very few to focus on area studies pedagogy. 4.╇ This is not to suggest, of course, that these interactive learning communities address all the imbalances of power inherent in area studies scholarship. Indeed, as some contributors to this volume discuss, the project raised new questions about forms of collaboration that rely on interactive technologies and may involve issues of class, social privilege, and access to technology (see, e.g., Wesley-Smith 2003).

References Appadurai, Arjun. 2001. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” In Globalization, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 1–21. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. BCAS (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars). 1969. Founding Statement. Accessed at http://www.bcasnet.org/ccas-sop.htm. Chang, T.â•›C. 2004. “Transborder Tourism, Borderless Classroom: Reflections on a Hawaii-Singapore Experience.” International Journal of Geography in Higher Education 28 (2): 179–195. Cumings, Bruce. 2002. “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies during and after the Cold War.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, 261–302. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Dirlik, Arif. 1997. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. ———. 1998. What’s in a Rim? Critical Perspectives in the Pacific Region Idea. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Friedman, Thomas L. 2005. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books. Gibson-Graham, J.â•›K. 2005. Area Studies after Poststructuralism. Environment and Planning A, 36: 405–419.

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Goss, Jon, and Ming-Bao Yue. 2005. “Introduction to ‘De-Americanizing the Global’: Cultural Studies Interventions from Asia and the Pacific.” Comparative American Studies 3 (3): 251–265. Hall, Robert B. 1947. Area Studies: With Special Reference to their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences. New York: Social Science Research Council. Harootunian, H.â•›D. 2002. “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian, 150–174. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Harootunian, H.â•›D., and Masao Miyoshi. 2002. “Introduction: The ‘Afterlife’ of Area Studies.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian, 1–18. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Heginbotham, Stanley J. 1994. “Rethinking International Scholarship: The Challenge of Transition from the Cold War Era.” Items, June–September. Kelly, John, and Martha Kaplan. 2001. Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Koppel, Bruce M. 1995. Refugees or Settlers? Area Studies, Development Studies, and the Future of Asian Studies. East-West Center Occasional Papers Education and Training Series, Number 1. Krauthammer, Charles. 1990/91. “The Unipolar Moment.” Foreign Affairs 70 (1): 23–33. Lewis, Martin, and Karen Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Little, Richard. 2000. “A ‘Balance of Power’?” In Contending Images of World Politics, edited by Greg Fry and Jacinda O’Hagan, 48–60. London: Macmillan Press. Ludden, David. 2000. “Area Studies in the Age of Globalization.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad VI (Winter): 1–22. Mirsepassi, Ali, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver. 2003. “Introduction: Knowledge, Power and Culture.” In Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, 1–21. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press. Miyoshi, Masao, and H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian, eds. 2002. Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Sharma, Miriam. 2005. “Beyond the Boundaries of Asia Pacific Area Studies.” Futures 37 (9): 989–1003. Szanton, David L. 2004a. The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004b. “The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States.” In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by D.â•›Szanton. Berkeley: University of California Press. Volkman, Toby Alice. 1999. Introduction. In Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies. New York: Ford Foundation.

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Wesley-Smith, Terence. 2000a. Introduction. “In Asia in the Pacific: Migrant Labor and Tourism in the Republic of Palau.” Special Issue of The Contemporary Pacific 12 (2): 307–317. ———. 2000b. “Historiography of the Pacific: The Case of ‘The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islands.’” Race and Class 41 (4): 101–117. ———. 2003. “Net Gains? Pacific Studies in Cyberspace.” The Contemporary Pacific 15 (1): 117–136.

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Part 1

Reshaping Area Studies in an Era of Globalization

A sense of contemporary crisis in area studies can be ascribed to recent real

shifts in the global geopolitical landscape engendered by the end of the Cold War, the (uneven) globalization of capitalist production, and various challenges to the sovereign power of the national state. However, the three chapters in this section together show that the apparently clear and fixed boundaries of the areas that we studied were always little more than arbitrary fictions convenient for instrumental purposes. Arif Dirlik points out, for example, that “there is nothing innocent about our spatializations of the world,” while Martin Lewis shows that none of the spatial units we use to understand the world are foundational, and Neil Smith asks why we use particular fictional categories and not others. Without coherently defined and consistent areas, how can we defend the institutional project of area studies? These contributions work together to expose the inadequacy of the conceptual categories we have used to bring order and stability to the temporal and spatial flux of our world. As they explore various frameworks proposed as alternatives to area studies, however, they also find them wanting. The challenge is not to find a convincing substitute for existing regional geographies as much as to problematize the spatializing project itself. Area studies must be more critically reflexive regarding its categories for ordering the world and more attentive to social geographical theory. 1

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For Dirlik, even as area studies has served its instrumental purpose, it has encouraged the study of languages and sensitive readings of cultural texts as well as permitted the development of a radical tradition that challenges the conventional mapping of the world. The crisis in area studies is symptomatic of a breakdown of the association of modernization with the West under conditions of “global modernity,” and the contemporary challenge to universalizing discourse by voices it had systematically disavowed. In the academic study of Asia Pacific, the response to this “return of the repressed” has been multiple competing proposals for recognizing the West’s others and for reordering the world, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Three conceptualizations can be relatively easily assimilated into the established geographies of area studies. The civilization model, for example, which has been reinvigorated by the dominant Anglo-American response to the events of September 11, highlights the challenge of Islamism and Confucian capitalism to the established global order. While reactionary and, as Lewis shows, theoretically incoherent and empirically weak, it nevertheless draws attention to the existence of multiple modernities and challenges the teleologies of humanism and liberalism. What Dirlik calls “indigenous culturalism,” on the other hand, challenges the authority of Western scholarship based on objectivist epistemology. Also reactionary and often unconsciously elitist, the claim that some aspects of other places and peoples simply cannot be known to outsiders nevertheless represents an important source of empowerment and resistance to colonialism. Finally, there is the Asianization of area studies, a self-conscious problematization of the “new Asia” by Asian scholars adopting a predominantly cultural studies approach. While countering hegemonic conceptions of modernity, this scholarship tends also to exhibit a class bias and is less sensitive to the broader regional experience and/or indigenous issues. Two conceptualizations present more of a challenge to the conventional geographies that underpin area studies. The oceanic imagination structures world geography around oceans, consistent with the tendency to organize the world in terms of “spaces of flows.” But Dirlik is concerned that this alternative plays into the ideology of a “friction-less” capitalism and marginalizes the places and peoples of the center, such as the island cultures of the Pacific. Martin Lewis, who was involved in the “Oceans Connect” project while in the Department of Comparative Area Studies at Duke University, also rejects the idea of the Pacific as a regional basis for area studies because of its size, limited regional integration, and the perceived emptiness of its center. The diasporic imagination, on the other hand, challenges the unity and fixity of human subjectivity and has played an important role in postcolonial

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criticism. But in its celebration of mobility and hybridity, this approach tends to privilege the experience of still relatively small populations at the expense of originating societies. In each of these alternatives Dirlik sees contradictory politics, with both prospects for further consolidation of the dominant Western project that gave rise to area studies, as well as for its critical deconstruction. He concludes on the necessity to embrace contradiction in our place-based analyses so that we take the “Asia Pacific,” for example, as an area formation shaped by interactions of capital, labor, and culture and structured by oppositions between East and West (“the clash of civilizations”), inside and outside (indigenism versus civilization), north and south (inequalities in development), and top and bottom (hierarchy of actors). Applying insights from new critical geography, Neil Smith advocates a reconceptualization of space as a social product, recognition that our spatial categories are always in the process of conservation and dissolution, and the redrawing of the world map at all scales. There are dangers that this “spatial turn” engenders merely the multiplication of shallow metaphors, such as the overuse of the word “landscape” to mean “field” or “area” (also spatial metaphors, of course) and of determinism, or what Lewis calls the “geographical fallacy,” the notion that geography is destiny, which seems to be staging a comeback among historians and social scientists. It is vital, however, that we understand the construction of world geography as the outcome of a historical dialectic between economic cooperation and competition under capitalism, including the ongoing rescaling of the functions of governance and the denationalization of state power that are producing new scales of activity. What appears to be a weakening of national borders, for example, obscures the complex differentiation of objects and subjects, and the restructuring of scales of activity, that determine their relative permeability. Here scale is not so much a point of view but a real entity in the landscape, and whether we consider the rise of the nation-state or the process of globalization, rescaling of the system of production is fraught with contradiction. Smith thus suggests that the relatively new area studies concept of “Asia Pacific,” for example, is at once an acknowledgment of the ongoing rescaling of social processes across Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas, which challenges conventional continental geographies and invites us to make new cultural connections, as it is also a convenience for a new round of institutionalization. As Dirlik suggests, it seems “the alternative is APEC forever.” Martin Lewis goes further than Smith when he suggests that while geography matters, it is not essential to global capitalist production and consumption. He argues for a view of the world that embraces a sensitivity to scale,

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recognizes the need to regionalize, and takes into account the fluidity of social processes. This allows us to reject conventional spatial units of area studies and “play” with multiple possible cartographies. Toward this end, Lewis provides a critique of conventional maps of the world, particularly demolishing the civilizational model on the grounds of the foundational and exceptional characters it imputes to Europe or the West. It is clear that all three authors believe that, as Smith puts it, “there is no magic answerâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›for the question [of] how to reconstruct the areal categories of area knowledge.” Nevertheless, the categories themselves are essential to the very nature of area studies, in fact productive of the field itself, and perhaps ultimately of global geographies. Lewis advocates area studies pedagogy that teaches alternative geographies and exposes the work of intellectual constructs, while Smith and Dirlik advocate a new Asia Pacific studies that vigorously prosecutes a “reconstructed area knowledge” responsive to the critiques from theoretical geography, cultural studies, indigeneity, and postcolonial studies, among others, in resistance to the instrumentalist tendencies of an older area studies.

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Chapter 1

Asia Pacific Studies in an Age of Global Modernity Arif Dirlik

Two developments over the past decade provide the conditions for the

reconsideration of area studies in general and Asian and Pacific studies in particular. One is the end of the Cold War, which in my mind includes not just the end of socialist states but also the end of colonialism in its modern forms, which had fueled the global revolutionary ferment that modernization discourse was intended to counter. As modernization discourse has become superfluous in tandem, so has the utility of spatializing the world into areas that were products of its Orientalist legacies, reinforced by post–World War II geopolitical assumptions. The other is the de-centering of a now globalized capitalism by the appearance of new centers of economic power, which were to play an important part in the emergence to visibility of new areas, most importantly the so-called Pacific Rim, and the reconceptualization it prompted of modernization as globalization. While globalization discourse is of obvious ideological utility in sugar-coating an unprecedented U.S. corporate domination of the world, it also represents an effort to account for both new unities and new fractures in a globe that is now under the unchallenged hegemony of capital. This is the situation of global modernity, when the identification of modernity with Western European and North American nations and regions has broken down, allowing for alternative cultural claims on the modern and reconfiguring the temporalities and spatialities of capitalist modernity. I suggest below that any discussion of Asian Pacific studies at the current conjuncture needs to account for its relationship to these regional and global transformations, both for its conceptual validation and to avoid instrumentalization in a new ideology of globalization. Given the apparently increasing volatility of our conceptualizations of the world and the rapid global 5

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transformations we are going through, it is more necessary than ever to be prudent about claims to alternative spatializations of the world. The ferment over area studies that is almost as old as their establishment in the 1950s and the 1960s, and has come to a head over the past decade, should give us pause when it comes to judging the outcomes of academic undertakings. What may be discussed more fruitfully are the ways in which we grasp the forces that shape the region, and the meaning we assign to them, which in turn have a good deal to do with our politics. We are quite aware by now that there is nothing innocent about our spatializations of the world. The Pacific has played a significant part over the past two decades in the production of discourses of globalization. Conflicts over the Pacific in turn offer clues to grasping ideological conflicts within these discourses. How we view the Pacific, and regionalize it, is not just an academic question but a political one as well. They may all refer to more or less the same location, but terms such as East and Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific, Pacific Asia, Pacific Rim, and the Pacific have different, and conflicting, referents that remain to be sorted out (Dirlik 1998a, 1998b, 1998c; Yui and Endo 2001). I will take up below five overlapping but nevertheless distinguishable trends that are especially noteworthy in their direct relevance to Asia Pacific Studies, though others could no doubt be added to them. These are civilizational studies, oceanic studies, the so-called Asianization of Asian studies, diasporic studies, and indigenous studies. Theoretically, moreover, these new trends in studying the world are entangled in issues raised by cultural studies (the cultural turn), postcolonial criticism (cultural identity and politics), and globalization (global and transnational networks, over nations and regions as sites of economic, social, political, and cultural activity). These entanglements also have called into question disciplinary boundaries, as well as introducing into the study of the world a new language of analysis. I choose these trends not only because of the visibility they have acquired in academic work in the United States and/or Asia since the late 1980s, but also because they are driven by important economic, social, and political forces at large in the world and represent efforts to grasp those forces conceptually. There is, in other words, a materiality to these conceptualizations that makes them compelling. They also represent intellectual constructs that endow those materialities with recognizable and comprehensible form, further focusing their force. As the forces they articulate are often at odds with one another, moreover, these intellectual trends address different aspects of contemporary political, cultural, and ideological realities, often in exclusion or contradiction of other alternatives. It is not possible to reduce one to

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another, or easily contain their diverse concerns within one acceptable spatiality or temporality. The very multiplicity of possible approaches, and the uncertainty about their longevity, raises a further, even more fundamental question: Is it wise to settle on any one approach—or paradigm—to the exclusion of others? This is the question I would like to address here. If there is a crisis in our ways of studying the world, including the Asia Pacific world, is this crisis likely to be resolved by the substitution of a new paradigm for the now seemingly defunct paradigm of area studies, or does the solution lie in a proliferation of paradigms in a world that does not lend itself to easy spatial or temporal containment? What we may be witnessing is an explosion into visibility of forces rendered invisible by area studies, the Cold War divisions of the world that area studies articulated, and, ultimately, modernity’s ways of organizing the world and knowing it, which are now reasserting themselves, empowered by the successes of that very same modernity, as well as its reconfiguration by new dynamic forces it has released.

The Crisis ofâ•—Area Studies The legacy of a half-century of area studies is of necessity the point of departure for the discussion here. The trends I mark here are products of developments that have progressively exposed the problems of dividing the world into rigidly conceived areas, and they are positioned conceptually by their advocates against area studies spatializations. While these alternatives have their own independent origins, they have been brought into focus and given further impetus (and financial incentive) by institutional activity to revamp area studies. I am referring to the Ford Foundation initiative “Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies,” of which this volume is one product among many. This initiative is not to be taken at face value, considering that the Ford Foundation also played a crucial part in the 1950s and 1960s in establishing area studies in United States universities. This most recent initiative was intended not to abolish but to “revitalize” area studies. The results have been ambiguous. Be that as it may, the involvement of one of the bedrock institutions of United States power and hegemony in efforts to change our ways of knowing provides an occasion to consider how the past may be alive in a new global structural context. There is little reason to rehearse here the many problems associated with area studies, with their conceptual context in a teleological and Eurocentric modernization discourse, their entanglement in the culturalist legacies of Orientalism, and their intimate relationship to a hegemonic ordering of the

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post–World War II world by the United States (Cumings 1997; Harootunian 2002; Palat 1996, 2002). It is important, however, to point to some of the more progressive features of area studies that are overlooked or dismissed too readily in more naïve critiques. The teaching of foreign languages has been crucial to area studies programs—in the case of many institutions, it has been their raison d’être. Few would dispute the contribution of language skills to an improved understanding of the world, and one wonders what withdrawal of support for area studies might mean for that particular activity. For all the problems of interpretation involved, moreover, area studies have been based on the premise of intensive reading of diverse texts, textual traditions, and histories. It is easy to lose sight of the significance of this task when attention shifts from reading to interpretation. Whatever the deficiencies of readings distorted by unequal relations of power, there is also a price to be paid, as we seem to be paying these days, for not reading at all.1 There are two other issues raised by area studies that bear more directly on their impact on the organization of scholarship and knowledge. These issues also point to differences in the configuration of area studies depending on the region in question, say East or South Asia, or Africa. First, the majority of so-called area scholars have specialized not in regions but in individual societies, such as Japan, Korea, or China. While a reified notion of civilizational legacies may have shaped the understanding of regions, in other words, it is nations that have been the units of scholarship. This would also suggest that the current critique of area studies includes within its compass the critique not only of regional but also nation-based scholarship. With both nation and region in question, the issue that faces us is where to draw the boundaries (I use the word advisedly) of scholarly specialization. Second, for all the culturally homogenizing assumptions underlying area studies, area scholars have been anything but homogeneous in their scholarship or politics. Areas have served as sites of conflict as much as sites of unity, with significant implications for the boundaries they have presented to scholarship or interpretation. Asian studies, for example, has been divided since its organized inception during World War II over the relationship of Asia scholars to Asian politics, a conflict which would become much sharper during the 1960s. The politics have also shaped theoretical orientations and interpretations, as well as the relationship of scholars in the United States to scholars in Asia. The culturalist legacies of Orientalism that were to shape modernization discourse, viewing regions and civilizations in isolation from one another, have been challenged over the years by transnationalist approaches to the study of Asian societies that have insisted on the importance of comprehending those societies in terms of their historically changing

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relationships to one another and to the world at large. I do not wish to downplay the hegemonic power of the assumptions underlying area studies, or the organizational power of its enforcers, but it may be worth pointing out that so long as scholars were willing to risk some academic marginalization, it was always possible to challenge those assumptions and to transgress the boundaries they defined. This was what radical scholars did.2 Indeed, what distinguishes contemporary critiques of area (and Asian) studies scholarship is not the critique of Orientalism per se, which has been in question since the beginning, but rather the inclusion in the critique of radical alternatives to Orientalist culturalism for their Eurocentrism. There is also in these recent critiques a suspicion of Marxism and of Marxist-inspired critiques of Orientalist scholarship, which at times is extended tendentiously to the denial of the theoretical formulations that Marxism provided for Asian and non-Asian scholarship alike. This prepared the ground for contemporary critiques. I bring up these issues not only to underline that the so-called crisis of area studies may be a product not just of their failure but also of their success, but more importantly, to call for the necessity of a more critical approach to contemporary alternatives to area studies. In the enthusiasm these trends invoke as constructive responses to a changing world situation, with some promise of overcoming past problems, it is also possible to overlook the problems they present, which demand critical attention because of their social and political implications. Preoccupation with overcoming past legacies may result in obliviousness to problems presented by new forces, as well as to the persistence within them of those very same legacies, albeit in new configurations. Area studies in their time had their justification as a novel effort to comprehend new forces at large in the world while also articulating the needs of a new vision of global power of capital and the state faced with the threat of socialism and its Third World permutations, as well as the challenge of containing and extinguishing that threat. We may similarly suggest that contemporary alternatives represent at once efforts to comprehend a world in the process of transformation by new forces, as well as new configurations of power. In other words, they express a real need to comprehend the novelties of a postsocialist, postcolonial world, but they are also ideological both in their reification of these new forces—captured most cogently in the slogan of globalization—and in obscuring new relations of domination and exploitation that follow somewhat different fault lines than they did in an earlier day, but may be dynamized by much the same forces. Radical critiques of area studies may be necessary to overcome this ideological obscurantism, but only if they are revised themselves to account for global transformations.

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Alternatives toâ•—Area Studies I would like to illustrate these observations by brief comments on the trends I identified above as contemporary alternatives to area studies. For all their differences from area studies, three of these trends (represented by civilizational, Asianization, and indigenous discourses) are arguably continuous with them in terms of fundamental spatial assumptions. The other two (oceanic and diasporic) have been set up consciously against area studies, claiming entirely novel spatialities. It may seem peculiar that I should identify civilizational studies as one of these alternatives, as they represent a throwback to a period even before area studies, and the identification of areas with civilizational legacies may be one of the fundamental weaknesses of area studies themselves. And yet it is necessary to recognize that contemporary developments have placed the issue of civilizations on the agenda in an urgent way. This urgency was dramatized by the events of September 11, but it had been in the making for some time before that, ironically in conjunction with the discourse of globalization. It may not be surprising that the scholar who placed civilizations back on the agenda in the early 1990s should be one whose scholarship is driven by geopolitical concerns: Samuel P. Huntington. It is noteworthy, however, that Huntington’s controversial Foreign Affairs article that pointed to civilizations as the units of conflict in the future was published in the same year, 1993, as a volume sponsored by the American Historical Association and edited by Michael Adas, Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order (Huntington 1993; Adas 1993). The issue of Islamic civilization was dramatically raised first by the Iranian revolution of 1979 that founded an Islamic republic with radical goals. The same year witnessed the publication of World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond, by Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute, which heralded the coming of the age of “NeoConfucian” capitalism. The coincidence of dates here is just that, a coincidence. What is important is that the issue of civilizations, with Islam and Confucianism in the foreground, was placed on the agenda by political and economic developments from the late 1970s: the rise of political Islam on the one hand, and the challenge to Euro-American economic dominance of Pacific Asian economic development on the other. By the 1990s, the issue of Asian versus Western values had become a central concern of cultural discussion. Huntington’s argument may have exerted the influence it did because it fell on receptive ears, not just in North America, but more importantly among the proponents of alternative civilizational claims. The civilizational argument is conservative in its assumptions, and it bolsters the most conservative interpretations of civilizational values in its

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reification of cultural boundaries, in ignoring different interpretations of those values, and in its obliviousness to the entanglements of all so-called civilizations in the practices and values of capitalist modernity. It also ignores populations in these societies who are quite divorced from received values and identifies entire societies and regions with their most conservative elements. It is heir also to the dehistoricizing/desocializing culturalism of the more obscurantist practices of Orientalism. And yet, as Huntington observed shrewdly, the revival of civilizational claims in recent decades does not represent a throwback to the past, but is quite modern and is empowered by modernity. While the reappearance of Orientalist practices does point to the persistence of colonial forms of knowledge past the political end of colonialism, these knowledges are now deployed by the colonized in what is now the return of colonial cultural inventions against colonial modernity. This is most readily evident in the case of Pacific Asian societies, whose cultural self-assertion accompanied, and was empowered by, success in the capitalist world economy that was to give rise to the Pacific Rim idea, which in turn has played a crucial part in the production of the discourse of globalization. Civilizational claims also have forced a rethinking of modernity, forcing a shift in recent years even in liberal and conservative circles from an earlier Eurocentric conception of modernity to ideas of alternative or multiple modernities that renounce teleologies informed by Euro-American modernities in favor of different civilizational routes to and out of modernity (Eisenstadt 2000). Indigenous studies, too, challenge Euro-American modernity and go even further in questioning modernity’s ways of knowing. Their distinctiveness, however, lies in the questions they raise about power and sovereignty, including the sovereignty of the nation-state on the one hand and the relationship of social organization and knowledge to place on the other. What they call into question is the idea of civilization itself as an abstraction from life that is destructive of life itself. The question is of foundational significance because it points to the relationship between politics, cultural identity, and practices of knowledge production. In a passionate defense of “insider’s” knowledge of the Pacific, Vilsoni Hereniko writes that “westerners seem to think they have the right to express opinions (sometimes labeled truths) about cultures that are not their own in such a way that they appear to know it from the inside out. Most seem to think they have the right to speak about anything and everything; many even think they have the right to coerce natives to divulge secrets about their cultures to them” (Hereniko 2000, 86). The validity of knowledge claims, therefore, is dependent not on methodological issues, but more importantly

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on who makes those claims and to what end. Knowledge becomes cultural; the more so the more cultural boundaries—defined by origins—assume a sharpness in policing who is inside and who is out. In describing why his access to his own (Rotuman) culture may be privileged, Hereniko writes that “the foreign anthropologist who has recently returned from the ‘field’ is likely to have a more accurate picture than I of the situation there. Yet there are certain matters, largely to do with intuition, emotion, and sensibility, that the outsider may never fully grasp, for these things are in the realm of the unseen, acquired through early socialization in the formative years, and perhaps inherent in the Rotuman gene pool” (Hereniko 2000, 90). We could dismiss Hereniko as a culturalist who reduces culture to unalterable essences, which ultimately render culture indistinguishable from race. Such a judgment may be too hasty, for we need to consider it not only in intellectual or academic terms but also the ethical and political issues involved. For one thing, Hereniko’s “insiderist” claims are at best partial, pertaining only to certain, more subjective aspects of culture and society. Intellectual choices moreover, are never just intellectual choices, but are ethical and political as well. There is a distinction to be drawn between the discourses of power and the discourses of societies so fragile that that they can be protected, at least in the short run, only by drawing exclusive boundaries between the inside and the outside, against an outside that long has been bent on the abolition of the inside. A constructionist approach to culture that insists on the inventedness of tradition may be useful in the deconstruction of power, but it may also serve the interests of power when deployed against the weak and powerless to undermine their cultural claims against oppressive power (Dirlik 1996). The claim to an alternative knowledge and an alternative history is not simply a reflection in the minds of the colonized of the racism of the colonizer, but a means to the production of a cultural identity that can then serve as the point of departure for social, political, and economic identity—an alternative way of life, in other words. As Epeli Hau‘ofa put it in his contribution to Remembrances of Pacific Pasts, We cannot therefore have our memories erased, foreshortened, or directed. With weak roots, we would be easily uprooted, transplanted, grafted upon, trimmed, and transformed any way that the global market requires. With little or no memory, we stand alone as individuals with no points of reference except to our dismally portrayed present, to our increasingly marketized national institutions, to international development agencies,

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international lending organizations, transnational corporations, fit only to be globalized or whateverized, and slotted in our proper places on the Human Development Index (Hau‘ofa 2000, 464). The project here is to create a Pacific version of the Pacific, which requires a rewriting of the past against a hegemonic historiography that claims scientific truth and dictates what is and what is not proper historical documentation in the search for the truth of the past. This historiography privileges written documentation over other sources, and since such documentation exists only for the post-European contact period, it relegates the precontact period to “prehistory.” To quote Hau‘ofa again, Oceania has no history before imperialism, only what is called “prehistory”; before history. In many if not most of our history books, more than 90 percent of the period of our existence in Oceania is cramped into a chapter or two on prehistory and perhaps indigenous social organization. These comprise a brief prelude to the real thing, history beginning with the arrival of Europeans. As it is, our histories are essentially narratives told in the footnotes of the histories of empires (Hau‘ofa 2000, 455–456).3 Indigenous culturalism is open to criticism along the same lines as civilizations, as it too engages in the reification of tradition. It ignores that the “West” is already internal to the consciousness of contemporary Pacific islanders, that the very idea of the Pacific that informs it is a product of the postcontact period, and that the proponents of a cultural “Pacific Way” are themselves elite products of the very scholarship they criticize—and even that the insistence on recalling native traditions as the basis for a native history faces the predicament of privileging hierarchical social organizations, with all their class and gender inequalities, including inequalities in the access to culture.4 Perhaps most importantly, while an indigenous culturalism may serve an important purpose in the struggle to overcome colonialism, past and present, it itself presents certain dangers. Indigenism, naturalized, may rule out distinctions between colonial oppressors and others, themselves escapees from colonial oppression, and justify oppressive practices of its own, as well as ethnic discrimination and inequality. There are Filipina maids not just in Hong Kong but on some Pacific islands, at the service of island “aristocracies.” Indigenism may also serve as an excuse to disenfranchise immigrant populations and may fuel ethnic conflict.

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The third alternative I noted above, the Asianization of Asian studies, is also directed against the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge, especially United States’ domination of scholarship. There is a suggestion here, too, about bringing into the dialogue Asia insiders’ views of Asian problems and scholarship. I am aware of two undertakings that are informed by this goal of Asianization. One is the “Asian Studies in Asia Network,” centered in Australian National University in Canberra. According to the home page of the network, the initiative for such a network grew out of “the developing understanding that, in an important sense and for important reasons, the core region for the study of Asia must be the Asian region itself” (Asian Studies in Asia Network 2002, 1). There is an irony to Asia-centered study of Asia that is spearheaded by Australia and funded by the Ford Foundation. The network was founded in 1998, in the midst of the Asianization of Australia. Now that forces of de-Asianization seem once again to have achieved supremacy in Australia, and Australian scholars are at one in bemoaning the decline of Asian studies, it remains to be seen if this move has any staying power. The other, more radical alternative is represented by the journal InterAsia Cultural Studies, centered in National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan but managed by an editorial collective that is spread across several Asian societies and beyond. This undertaking, devoted explicitly to cultural studies, is also driven by a conviction that cultural studies of Asia should not only have voices emanating from Asia but be based there as well. Its goal, however, is not just to study but to “problematize ‘Asia,’” as the first issue of the journal in April 2000 stated. As the editorial statement to this first issue put it, Since the 1980s, a pervasive rhetoric of the “rise of Asia” has come to mean more than the concentrated flow of capital in and out of the region: it has come to constitute a structure of feeling that is ubiquitous, yet ambiguously felt, throughout Asia. Historically, this feeling of the “rise of Asia” is complicated by the region’s colonial past. While Asia’s political, cultural and economic position in the global system will continue to fluctuate, there is a need to question and critique the rhetorical unities of both the “rise” and of “Asia.” Wealth and resources are unevenly distributed and there is no cultural or linguistic unity in this imaginary space called Asia. On the other hand, no matter whether there are common experiences shared by sub-regional histories, there is an urgent need for forging political links across

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these sub-regions. Hence, “Inter-Asia” cultural studies (InterAsia Cultural Studies 2000, 5). True to their radical mission, the editors also describe Inter-Asia Cultural Studies as the “Movements project,” as “a transborder collective undertaking to confront Inter-Asia cultural politics” (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2000, 5). To their credit, scholars in neither of these undertakings pretend that they are out to provide “insiders’” views of Asia that are unavailable to outsiders; they recognize quite readily, I think, that they themselves are products of “non-Asian” educations, as well as the obscurantism that is implicit in most claims to insiderism. If anything, these undertakings signal the selfconfidence and assertion of modern Asian scholars against the domination of the study of Asia by scholars located in North America and Europe, with whom they may share a common education but not necessarily a common appreciation of the problems of Asia. The more important issue, I believe, is to bring to the forefront of discussions problems that may not be of concern to those outside the region but are crucial to those within. Inter-Asia goes much further, I think, in stressing Asian differences, including intra-Asian colonialism, and the unity it envisions is not one that is implicit in Asia, so-called, or some abstract Asian culture, but one that needs to be forged in the course of political and intellectual activity. One problem is that neither of these undertakings have devoted much attention to Asia Pacific issues, which is all the more striking in the case of Inter-Asia, given the concern of the editors for issues of labor and social movements. The three alternatives above arguably represent intellectual and political differences within a common legacy; they could be described even as struggles that leave the basic regionalizations of the world intact but bring additional complications into them—from the outside and the inside. The last two alternatives are more direct—and problematic—in the repudiation of areas. Oceanic studies found its most cogent articulation in the “Oceans Connect” project at Duke University, which its directors have described as “a maritime response to the crisis in area studies.” The project was simple. It sought to abandon areas and organize study around major bodies of water: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Caspian. For the directors, the project was part of a larger project of deconstructing continents.5 This alternative, too, directly addresses realities of the contemporary world, of which the most striking is our subject here, the Pacific, which in its emergence to global political and scholarly consciousness in the 1980s also dramatized the importance of transoceanic interactions and exchanges. This is also what renders this alternative as problematic as it may be relevant. The

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Pacific in its most recent emergence—as Asia Pacific or Pacific Rim—was hyped up as the new frontier of capitalism in a way that ignored not only the problems that came with the new frontier, but erased those within the rim. Its ideological implications were spelled out eloquently by Chris Connery when he wrote that, The idea of a Pacific Rim had a further advantage: it centered on an ocean. Water is capital’s element.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The bourgeois idealization of sea-power and ocean-borne commerce has been central to the mythology of capital, which has struggled to free itself from tilling the soil. Movable capital is liquid capital, and without movement, capital is a mere Oriental hoard (Connery 1995). As Jerry Bentley was to point out in a discussion of an “ocean-centered” view of history, moreover, the idea is not quite novel, but has a history going back in historical scholarship to Fernand Braudel’s monumental The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London, 1972–1973), followed by such seminal works as K.â•›N.â•›Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1989) and O.â•›H.â•›K.â•›Spate’s magisterial three-volume study of the Pacific, The Pacific Since Magellan (Minneapolis, 1979–1988) (Bentley 1999). These authors did not insist, however, that the study of oceans becomes a substitute for the study of land. Hans Bitterli has written in his Cultures in Conflict that scholarship in the eighteenth century, the century of Europe’s exploration and conquest of the Pacific, was obsessed with the oceans, and that it was only in the nineteenth century that attention turned to land (Bitterli 1986, chapter 7). His observation has to say something about our own age as well, at least in its “Pacific Rim” guise. Without a critical appreciation of the role of power in structuring “oceans,” the oceanic alternative itself becomes a celebration of power, power organized differently from the power that informs area studies but still power—the power of exchange and movement. There is a celebration also of off-ground cosmopolitanism, as is expressed clearly in a contribution by Carolyn Cartier to a special issue of the Geographical Review devoted to the subject (Cartier 1999). The ocean the contributors have in mind is not the ocean of Epeli Hau‘ofa (Hau‘ofa 1995). It is rather the ocean of the Pacific Rim, where those within the rim are missing from the picture, as are those on the rim, landlocked as they are, whose relationships of exploitation and oppression are driven to the margins of the sea. There is an elision in this

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alternative of the very obvious problems that oceans and seas do not just shape the societies around them, but also are shaped by them. To set the one against the other, or to isolate the one from the other, is simply to deprive the relationship between land and sea of the dialectic that shapes both. The final alternative I will take up here is that of diaspora, which replaces areas and groundedness with the motions of peoples. Diasporic spaces cut across nations, regions, and oceans. These spaces, moreover, are products of motions that, while not quite random, are nevertheless subject to flux and variation, undermining efforts at the establishment of fixed and stable spatialities. The idea of diaspora has been important in deconstructing claims not only of regions and civilizations but of nations as well. The question of cultural identity raised by diasporas also resonates with the politics of identity and location that has been integral to postcolonial criticism. Diasporas, nevertheless, present problems of their own. Diasporic identities, too, are place-based, products of the dialectics of cultural identities in concrete places. But there is an unavoidable problem in the notion of diasporas that persists even in the grounding of diasporic populations: taking a single population as the site of identity formation and struggle. Even where place-based and other social differences (class, gender, etc.) are recognized, the very naming of the diasporic population stamps it with ethnic, national, or racial characteristics that survive despite all difference, as in Chinese diaspora, for example, where Chineseness becomes a marker even when the populations encompassed by the term are marked by significant historical and cultural differences. Diasporas easily lend themselves to racialization, both by societies of arrival and by the diasporic population itself. This exacerbates divisions in societies of arrival, where the persistence of diasporic identification leads almost readily to underlining its foreignness, more often than not expressed in the language of race. While diaspora contributes to the deconstruction of reified notions of region and nation, it can also displace regions and nations to the point where it has negative consequences for our understanding of the world. The preoccupation with populations in diaspora, or “transnations,” seems on occasion to obviate the need for closer understanding of situations in the societies of departure or arrival, in effect substituting the study of diaspora for the study of “established” societies or creating a tendency to view the latter through the eyes of the diasporic population closer to home. This seriously affects the understanding of the world. There is the opposite tendency as well, distancing the diasporic population from the society of arrival, in effect denying their historicity by encapsulating them in a cultural space defined by the society of origin. Rather than deconstruct nations and nationalism, in other words,

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diasporas may serve also to further project into transnational spaces the powers of capital and the nation-state (Dirlik 2002). This confounding of diasporic populations with societies of origin is exacerbated by institutional tendencies in an environment dominated by multiculturalism and identity politics. There has been some tendency in recent years, under the sign of the diaspora, to merge the study of ethnic groups in the United States (Chinese Americans, for example) with the study of the country in which the group originated (such as “China,” which term itself covers a great deal of difference), regardless of where or how long ago. Given the cultural differences created in the course of a long history of migration, the merger of Chinese Americans and Chinese on the basis of some diasporic identity is not justifiable on the grounds of culture, but it feeds off racial identifications. The politics of identity is itself fraught with danger in perpetuating the language of race it is intended to overcome.

Global Modernity,â•—Areas, Places What do we make of all this? These trends represent developments that are not likely to go away. They may not signal the end of area studies, and perhaps they should not; specialized knowledge of areas around the world becomes more important as the concentration of imperial power in the hands of the United States government increases chances of conflict around the globe, fueled and justified by stereotyped representations of the Other. On the other hand, these trends do not merely revitalize area studies but also provide alternatives to it, as was indicated by a follow-up study by the Ford Foundation of the “Crossing Borders” project (Ford Foundation 1999). This too is important as the fixed and stable areas of area studies no longer can contain forces that work to reconfigure economies, societies, cultures, and politics globally. There seems little reason to make hard and fast choices between any of these trends as a dominant paradigm, as they speak to different aspects of these changes. Perhaps we have to learn to live with a world that does not lend itself to order, where no paradigm is likely to cover the changes at work, and anything goes that helps us deal with its vagaries. What may be more important is to decide what to do with these conflicting paradigms, and to what end. This question has guided my discussion of the various trends I singled out for their relevance to Asia Pacific Studies. Developments in and around the Pacific have played a major part in the production of the phenomena that call for new paradigms. The paradigms, in turn, help us grasp these phenomena, giving them some coherence. Civilizational revivals, the new attention to

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oceans, controversies over inside-out forms of knowledge, diasporic motions, and indigenous movements are all part of the making of Asia Pacific that call for new modes of understanding. These trends, or paradigms if you like, lend themselves to service in the consolidation of power as much as they do to its deconstruction in the service of social welfare and democracy. Civilizational revivals help challenge EuroAmerican domination of modernity, but only at the cost of cultural reifications that disguise relationships of oppression and exploitation that are internal to the civilizations. They also conceal the emergence of a transnational class that shares a common interest in global capitalism and displaces its contradictions to the realm of culture. The “Asianization of Asian Studies,” at least in its establishment version, is an instance of such complicity. On the other hand, the Inter-Asia version, which demands questioning both of Euro-American power and of the reification of Asia, draws attention to the possibilities and actualities of a radical oppositional politics, including the construction of areas from below, so to speak. Oceans may represent projection of placebased indigenous ideals into space, as they do for an Epeli Hau‘ofa, or they may be used in service of an APEC version of space in service of capital and states. They also serve to conceal, in the latter case, that most struggles for liberation against injustice in fact happen on land. Diasporas may serve new forms of power in the service of states or transnational capital projecting their power through dispersed populations, or they may serve to deconstruct the reification of culture and race in the service of power, substituting for the abstractions of globality place-based negotiations that seek to overcome national and racial difference. Even indigenism, the most radical of these alternatives in its challenge to the project of modernity, lends itself to the subjection of indigenous peoples to the prerogatives of power, so long as some among the leadership are accepted into the ranks of the powerful. Asia Pacific as an idea is a product of these conflicting tendencies. Asian Pacific American emerged early on in the course of ethnic struggles in the United States to underline a commonality of interest among Americans of Asian and Pacific descent. As far as I am aware, however, its entry into the language of the social sciences accompanied the popularization of Pacific Rim discourse in the 1980s, when a rush began to rename formerly East and Southeast Asian studies programs to gain access to newly available funds from East Asia. The term, in other words, bears upon it the stamp both of APEC discourse (“APEC means business”) and a legacy of radical opposition to ethnic and racial discrimination in United States society, which in its origins was informed by a social radicalism challenging not just ethnic but also class and gender oppression.

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I observed in a recent essay that the contemporary Pacific is the site for a number of cultural conflicts: East-West, north-south, inside-out (Dirlik 2001, 2–28). The East-West conflict is a conflict between civilizational claims, most notably so-called Asian values versus Western values. The north-south conflict points to immense inequalities in the Pacific region that APEC discourse has sought to contain and conceal. The inside-out conflict is between indigenism and the values of civilization, Eastern or Western, which are equally devoted to ideologies of development. Asia Pacific is a term that weighs the Pacific toward Asia, away from its eastern shores. It is ironic that a term that was a product of United States perceptions of Pacific Asian developments should come to serve the purpose of bringing the Pacific closer to Asia, but there is good reason for it. The reason does not lie in any particular closeness between Asian and Pacific peoples or in an assumption that a Pacific that is closer to Asia would fare better under Asian civilizational values than under so-called Western ones. It lies, rather, in the motions of labor, capital, and culture that bring Asians to the Pacific as investors, tourists, and workers, more often than not (although I am on risky ground here) as subcontractors in production for the United States market. We have here a different area formation, if we want to use that term, one that is based not on abstractions of civilizations, languages, etc., but on interactions, from the top and bottom, that shape lives on an everyday basis. It is one where the interplay between national, regional, and global forces, from labor to capital, at particular locations, shape the notion of areas, which are integrally related to other areas, and to the structures of globality. Recognition of areas in their concrete formations exposes the ideological mystifications promoted by the spatialities of area studies. Border crossings are crossings only against a legacy of abstractly established borders, which do not correspond to the borders shaped by flows of labor and capital in the modern world. Asia and the Pacific formed a common area from the early nineteenth century when Asian laborers were transported to the Pacific islands to meet the needs of colonial production. The laborers, no less than the indigenous peoples, were products of colonialism. A radical perspective on Asia Pacific needs to grasp Asia Pacific as a formation of contradictory forces, most importantly from the top and bottom. Capitalism may be reconfigured by its very globalization. On the other hand, it is still capital, now distributed around a multiplicity of centers across the Pacific, that shapes the motions of labor and commodities, as well as the fate of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. Capital has the power to structure the region and to shape the content of Asia Pacific Studies as a contemporary version of area studies. This structure, however, is a structure of contradic-

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tions, producing difference as well as sameness within, undermining the very boundaries it sets in its aspiration to globality. It is these contradictions that make possible alternative visions of the region, as well as challenges to its structuring of power. Place-based analysis is crucial in either case: to the analysis of this regional formation in motion as a recognition of difference within a general framework of the global and the local, and in exploring possibilities of overcoming difference in alliances for democracy and social welfare. Place-based analysis, however, must account for the larger structures that impinge on places. The inside-out perspective needs to come to terms with the north-south perspective, so that different experiences of oppression, exploitation, and erasure in a colonial historiography may be articulated to one another in the formulation of oppositional strategies. The alternative is APEC forever.

Notes 1.╇ While postcolonial criticism has been important in underlining the relationship between power and representation, the fashionable preoccupation with representation has led to a decline of interest in Third World locations and what people in those locations have had to say about themselves. The ignorance about Islam, Afghanistan, and western Asia at a time of crisis may testify to this problem. For a forceful critique, see Cumings 2002. 2.╇ The organization of Asian studies was plagued from the beginning by political questions involving the Institute of Pacific Studies. For a discussion, see Hucker 1973, especially pp. 58–81. 3.╇ The relationship between empire and history as epistemology is a prominent theme in contemporary critiques of colonial cultural hegemony. For other examples by two distinguished thinkers, one Indian, the other Amerindian, see Nandy 1995 and Deloria, Jr. 1995. 4.╇ For a reasoned consideration of the issues involves, see Jolly 1992. Pacific writers are not unaware of the predicament of tradition. Hau‘ofa (2000, 463) writes that “we cherish and respect our connections to our aristocracies, mainly because we have no choice; and for the same reason ‘we love and respect our oppression,’ as a waggish colleague puts it. Nevertheless, they are the major component of our heritage and so we must carry them all, the good and the ugly, for only then can we learn properly from our histories.” 5.╇ The project directors at Duke University were Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen. They were also the editors of a special issue of Geographical Review devoted to the problem of areas (Lewis and Wigen 1999). See the introduction to the issue. See also Lewis and Wigen 1997.

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References Adas, Michael, ed. 1993. Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order. American Historical Association. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Asian Studies in Asia Network. 2002. Asian Studies in Asia. Accessed at http:// asianet.anu.edu.au/about.html. Bentley, Jerry H. 1999. “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis.” Geographical Review 89 (2): 215–225. Bitterli, Hans. 1986. Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and NonEuropean€ Cultures, 1492–1800. Translated by Ritchie Robertson. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford€University Press. Cartier, Carolyn. 1999. “Cosmopolitics and the Maritime World City.” Geographical Review 89 (2): 279–291. Connery, Christopher L. 1995. “Pacific Rim Discourse: The US Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years.” In Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, edited by Rob€Wilson and Arif Dirlik, 30–56. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Cumings, Bruce. 1997. “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Studies 29 (1): 6–26. ———. 2002. “Some Thoughts Subsequent to September 11th.” Perspectives from the Social Sciences. Social Science Research Council. Accessed at http://www.ssrc .org/sept11/essays/cumings.htm. Deloria Jr., Vine. 1995. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific€Fact. New York: Scribner. Dirlik, Arif. 1996. “The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the€Perspective of Indigenous Historicism.” Amerindian Culture and Research€Journal 20 (2): 1–32. ———. 1998a. Pacific Contradictions. In What Is In a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, edited by A.â•›Dirlik, 3–13. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 1998b. “The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure.” In What Is In a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, edited by A.â•›Dirlik, 15–36. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. ———, ed. 1998c. What Is In a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2001. “East-West/North-South/Inside-Out: Thinking about Culture and Cultural Conflict in the Pacific.” In Framing the Pacific in the 21st Century: Coexistent and Friction, edited by D.â•›Yui and Y.â•›Endo, 2–28. Tokyo: Center for Pacific and American Studies, University of Tokyo. ———. 2002. “Intimate Others: Nations and Diasporas in an Age of Globalization.” Anthropologichni izsledvaniya (Studies in Anthropology) 3:11–28 (in Bulgarian). Eisenstadt, Shmuel, ed. 2000. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus 129 (1). Ford Foundation. 1999. Crossing Borders Assessment Project. Accessed at http:// www.crossing-borders.net/cb_assessment.pdf.

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Harootunian, Harry. 2002. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. 1995. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 147–161. ———. 2000. “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember.” In Remembrances of Pacific Pasts, edited by Robert Borofsky, 453–471. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Hereniko, Vilsoni. 2000. “Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism.” In Remembrances of Pacific Pasts, edited by Robert Borofsky, 78–91. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Hucker, Charles O. 1973. The Association for Asian Studies: An Interpretive History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, for the Association for Asian Studies. Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (Summer): 22Â�–49. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 2000. Editorial Statement. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1 (1): 5–6. Jolly, Margaret. 1992. “Specters of Inauthenticity.” The Contemporary Pacific 4 (1): 49–72. Lewis, Martin, and Karen Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1999. “A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies.” Special issue of The Geographical Review 89(2). Nandy, Ashis. 1995. “History’s Forgotten Doubles.” History and Theory (May): 44–66. Palat, Ravi. 1996. “Fragmented Visions: Excavating the Future of Area Studies in a Post-American World.” Review xix (3): 269–315. ———. 2002. “Is India Part of Asia?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (6): 669–691. Wilson, Rob, and Arif Dirlik, eds. 1995. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Yui Daizaburo and Yasuo Endo, eds. 2001. Framing the Pacific in the 21st Century: Coexistence and Friction. Tokyo: Center for Pacific and American Studies, University of Tokyo.

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Chapter 2

Remapping Area Knowledge Beyond Global/Local Neil Smith

A good argument can be made that area studies emerged in the United States in part because of the weakness of that country’s academic geography by the 1940s. The instrumental need for knowledge of the postwar world, which largely drove the founding of area studies, was poorly served by U.S. geography. The situation was very different in Europe, where intellectuals fed institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Società Geografica Italiana, the Société de Géographie de Paris, to name but three, and these societies were in turn the think tanks of national imperial ambition in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The reason for the weakness of U.S. geography is itself a long story that has to do with specific academic and national histories, but also the particular form U.S. global ambition took. It would be a diversion to relate that history here; suffice it to say that this helps to explain why area studies are such a specifically, if not exclusively, U.S. phenomenon. Part of my argument here is that questions of social geographical theory, which began to develop seriously only in the past three decades, now have a lot to offer toward the reconstitution of area knowledge. In a peculiar way, the situation today is reversed from that of, say, 1945: geographical theory is now strong and area studies finds itself in crisis. It is now conventional wisdom that since the 1970s the organization of the global political economy according to a system of national states has broken down. Whether captured under the rubric of “globalization,” a “borderless world,” or the “end of the nation-state,” the common assumption is that national boundaries are far less potent obstacles to the movement of goods, capital, ideas, and people than in earlier times. This argument spans the political spectrum. Inspired in large part in the halls of financial capital as a corollary to global marketing, financial and currency deregulation, and the 24

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financialization of everyday life (c.f. O’Brien, 1992; Ohmae 1990, 1995), this argument also has more progressive variants that are just as influential (Castells 1996–1998; Virilio 1997; Hardt and Negri 2000). The reality however is much more complicated, and there is a complex relationship between three kinds of contemporary shifts: first, the restructuring of geographical space implied in claims of globalization or a borderless world; second, the restructuring of geographical scale that frames new patterns of spatial differentiation; and third, the powerful social flows that directly challenge inherited configurations of local, regional, national, and transnational boundaries. In short, received categories of area, whether defined at the national or continental scale, are no longer as stable as they may once have been, and the organization of area studies based on these categories—Asia Pacific Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, Russian Studies, etc.—is in turn destabilized. A desideratum of a rethought area knowledge therefore is a rethinking of the area categories according to which that knowledge is organized. This is not merely a methodological exercise or conceptual updating, but insofar as a new suite of areal categories ought to express real-world transformations, it will involve an examination of the ways in which the map of the world, at all scales, is being redrawn. We can put this argument more graphically. The relatively stable global system of national political economies, clumped into First, Second, and Third Worlds, that dominated the postwar period has clearly come apart. However passing and geographically partial, this system of states formed the organizing cartography for area studies. What counts as an area or even as a border around a certain area has been radically transformed. It is as if the whole global jigsaw puzzle was thrown in the air and we are currently trying to put the pieces back together again, conceptually as well as in practice. The rhetoric of globalization represents one such attempt to do precisely this. The problem is, of course, that the jigsaw pieces that went up during the economic and political crisis of the late 1960s to the 1980s are not the same pieces that came down. On the one hand, supra-national units—the European Union, Association of South East Asian Nations, North American Free Trade Agreement, etc.—have usurped some of the economic prerogatives of nation-states, while global para-state institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization have enjoyed increased power. On the other hand, the power of metropolitan areas in the global economy has also increased vis-à-vis nation-states. As the events of September 11th, 2001, and the subsequent wars against Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, these shifts are obviously quite uneven with some national states losing power to the global scale while others actually gain

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power. By the same token some cities have prospered in the new globalism while others have lost out. To understand the scope and significance of these developments vis-à-vis transnational flows of goods, capital, ideas, and people, and the constitutive effects of these flows vis-à-vis different areas, it is vital to get a sense of the broader outlines of these shifts. In the first place, it is important to understand the ways in which social flows are implicated in the making of geographical space. Second, it is important to know how spatial differences are dissolved and reconstructed, and this involves centrally the making of geographical scale. Put differently, how do certain kinds of areas and borders get constructed, others eroded, still others reconstructed in the context of specific, shifting, and intensified transnational flows associated with a new globalism? An examination of the processes involved in making this new global geography provides a vital foundation for rethinking how area knowledge in turn should be formulated. There is of course a whole raft of other kinds of critiques of traditional area studies, ranging from its U.S.-centric origins, its political collaboration (also uneven and not total) with the interests of the U.S. state and capital, its exclusion of the objects of knowledge who are prevented from becoming its subjects, and so forth, but in this essay I focus on the specifically spatial critique of area studies, preferring to think in terms of the reconstruction of “area knowledge.” I use this language to begin to focus on some of the new conceptual departures that need to be made from the established institutional framework of area studies. As such, this argument draws heavily on the exciting new theoretical work that has revivified geography, broadly conceived, over the past two or three decades. By the same token, and so as not to create false expectations, there is no magic answer that emerges from geographic theory for how to reconstruct the areal categories of area knowledge. But it does provide a rigorous perspective and alert us to many false assumptions that lie embedded in our current division of the world into area specialties.

The Production of Space Virtually instinctive today in Western thought is the sense of space as emptiness. Deriving largely from Newton, Kant, and Descartes, space is conceived as absolute, a priori; space simply is. Natural and social events happen in (absolute) space, which can be differentiated according to a three- (or more) dimensional coordinate system. Space and time are the all-encompassing containers of material events and processes, the fields within which objects and events can be located with precision. With little critical distance, the social

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sciences have generally adopted this conception of absolute space, which today has risen to the status of common sense. This has led to a very specific spatial sensibility in the Western world over the past two centuries and, ironically, to a certain lost geographical sensibility; the United States represents the extreme case albeit one that generalizes itself energetically (Smith 2003). But truly radical thought, as Albert Einstein once remarked in precisely the context of our concepts of space and time, involves ruling one’s concepts rather than being ruled by them, and quite different conceptions of space are available historically and philosophically, not least since Einstein himself almost a century ago. Finally, they are beginning to resurface in social science research. Space and time for Einstein were relative, and here relativity theory from the early years of the twentieth century draws, among other things, on the philosophical ideas of Leibniz, who famously lost out in the debates against Newton. That Newton was the radical while Leibniz was the conservative is not at all accidental, but from the perspective of today certainly ironic. In a precapitalist world of common ownership and communal land use, and with the fuzzy and often unspecified delineation of boundaries between different communities, duchies, marches, fiefdoms, clan territories, and the like, absolute conceptions of space represented otherworldly abstractions from daily life. Newton’s radicalism came with his instantiation of an absolute sense of space geared in greater or lesser degree to the emerging radicalism of a bourgeois world rooted in private property and discretely bounded nationstates—two forms of spatial differentiation that mobilize absolute claims over space. Leibniz’s conservatism kept alive an older, relational way of conceiving space, which, ironically, has great relevance again today in the context of the destabilization of given areas and boundaries. As the reference to Einstein indicates, in the early part of the twentieth century science shared with art a radical sensibility about space—a critique and rejection of Newtonian absolutism—that has long eluded the social sciences (Kern 1983). Not until the 1970s, with the pioneering work of the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre (1974; tr: 1991; see also 2002), and in English the work of a generation of post-1960s radical geographers, has the absolutist spatial orthodoxy of the social sciences been dramatically challenged. Lefebvre argued powerfully that the space of Newton and Descartes represented a narrow and special case and that the priority of absolute space had to be challenged. To this extent, he sided with Einstein and Leibniz (and Hegel) over Kant, Descartes, and Newton. It is not that material and social events take place “in space and time,” rather that material and social events make the spaces and times they occupy. The crucial question, Lefebvre argued, involves the different regimes according to which different spatialities

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are made. Different kinds of social flows and social relations make different geographies, broadly conceived. More than anyone Lefebvre orchestrated a “regime change” in current social conceptions of space. At the very least, the lesson from this work is that the definition of areas employed in area knowledge has to be supple and open to change as global patterns of spatial differentiation themselves change. In the academic literature as in popular culture there is a contradictory shift regarding space and spatiality. On the one hand, globalization and related discourses have encouraged a sense that we are somehow “beyond geography.” The promise of globalization is an equalization of economic opportunity and cultural access around the world. This is the import of arguments about the borderless world. It is vividly expressed in the disciplines of economics and political science, for example, where knowledge of specific places is increasingly treated as inferior or even irrelevant in the face of universal theoretical commitments to rational choice theory, theories of global trade, and the like. And yet this “end of geography” rhetoric is simultaneously contradicted by the new fashionability of spatial questions and spatial metaphors. Partly building on Lefebvre but stemming from myriad other material and conceptual inspirations, there has been a forceful reassertion of spatial consciousness since the 1980s, ranging through political, cultural, and especially academic institutions. Historians and social scientists have begun to rediscover questions of spatial difference, albeit often in quite determinist tones (Landes 1998; Diamond 1997; see also Dalby 1991). Even more powerfully, the so-called cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, from Foucault to feminism, poststructuralism to postmodernism, has been underwritten by a broad deployment of spatial metaphors that makes the cultural turn simultaneously a spatial turn. Oxford literary critic Terry Eagleton has captured this shift, announcing that the discipline of geography, “which used to be about chaps and maps, now looks set to become the sexiest discipline of all” (Eagleton 1997; Katz and Smith 1993). National Geographic went further; in 1999 they sponsored millennium-ending radio, television, and Internet programs proclaiming the twentieth century to have been “the geographic century.” By one account, then, the so-called American Century took us beyond geography; by another, it was the geographic century. This ideological contradiction between a spaceless and a spatially constituted globalism is latent throughout the history of twentieth-century political, cultural, and economic power. It rose to the surface at crucial historical moments, was strongest during the formative moments of the American empire—first in the period from 1898 to 1919, then at the close of World War II, and third in the

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contemporary period—and it points to the powerful need to unravel the constitutive spatiality of contemporary globalization and its preludes. In the end, claims concerning the “end of geography” express less the realities of a new utopian world order—literally an aspatial world—than a certain ideological apprehension about how the future will turn out. They issue during periods of particularly intense spatial transformation, such as “globalization,” and are accompanied by wide public interest in the connections between economic and political change. Yet claims of a despatialized world economy obscure rather than illuminate the very real spatial shifts that have framed the recent history and politics of an emerging American empire. The “borderless world” represents a certain pretense of self-flattering global control; it provides ideological camouflage for the fact that global power always has very precise and specific locations. The despatialized world of globalization—globalization as an inevitable, inexorable evolution—is simultaneously a depoliticization. The corollary therefore beckons: a re↜spatialization of global vision brings the opportunity, even the obligation, of re↜politicization. Lefebvre’s argument concerning the production of space has profound implications for the ways we conceive social processes, social flows, and the constitution of areas. It is no longer sufficient to conceive of social processes taking place on a spatial tabula rasa. Rather, spatial form is conceived as simultaneously an outcome and condition of social process. The definition of areas and regions, nations and localities, the making and breaking of boundaries—political, economic, cultural—are integral to the gamut of social processes and flows. Territories are socially made much as social processes bear the imprint of the places that spawn them. This puts the focus on a certain tension between fixity and fluidity, between the ways in which places, territories, and borders at all scales become comparatively fixed in space over a significant period and the ways in which such fixed entities are dissolved in favor of new fluidities and fixities. Viewed this way, the present predicament is less one of coming to terms with the dissolution of territories, borders, and areas, and what this means for social flows, than it is of understanding the ways in which old places, areas, and borders are selectively fragmented, broken down, and made porous while at the same time being reconstructed at different scales, and how this spatial and scalar restructuring in turn helps sculpt social flows. There are many examples of these processes. The making of twentiethcentury U.S. suburbs, to take an obvious case, expressed specific class, race, and gender assumptions and at the same time produced a landscape that ratified these same assumptions. The making of “the Third World” as a locus of “development” in the global political economy likewise spatialized a certain

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division of labor in the global economy and did so in a fashion that built patterns of exploitation and oppression into the fabric of the physical landscape. A simple contrast between the relatively replete transportation systems of Europe and North America on the one side with the highly nodal transportation structures of sub-Saharan Africa, geared not to local requirements but to the needs of resource exports, is equally telling. The nodal structure of African transportation structures, focusing inordinately on primate port cities, expresses in spatial form not the range of continental social needs but the colonial and postcolonial traffic of raw material, labor, and commodity extraction for the world economy.

Making Scale The production of space involves not just the patterning of landscapes but the production of spatial difference and the more or less organized differentiation of places from each other. For all Lefebvre’s brilliance in conceptualizing “the production of space,” and although he championed “differential space” as a political antidote to the homogenization of space perpetrated by global capital flows and state power, he offered little concrete information about how geographical space is actually differentiated in specific places at specific times. While there is a powerful and explicitly political language discerning the temporal difference between different periods and eras of history, there is no such well-developed language for spatial difference. How do specific spaces come to be identified as discrete places and how do these places come to be differentiated one from the other? This is where the question of geographical scale becomes crucial. In line with traditional notions of absolute space, it is commonplace to treat geographical scale as either a given or as a methodological choice. On the one hand, we treat the scale of the globe, the region, or the body as simply given, dictated by laws of nature or social convention; on the other hand, as social researchers we recognize a choice of scale at which to aim our research. If we take seriously the argument about the social production of space, however, it makes sense to insist that in addition to these two treatments of scale, we can also recognize a production of spatial scale according to which specific scales are not simply conceptual choices nor merely given but operate as very real entities in the landscape (Smith 1993). A simple example may help to clarify this. The urban scale in West African or Mediterranean city-states in the fifteenth century is quite different from today’s urban scale, which incorporates the capitalist metropolises of Tokyo (twenty-six million people), Sao Paulo (eighteen million), or Mum-

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bai (eighteen million). By the same token there was virtually no urban scale at all in most of pre-Roman northern Europe. Less obviously perhaps, the whole language of “globalization” today can be seen as part of a simultaneously practical and conceptual effort to redefine the global scale; the apparent givenness of the global scale encourages a sense of the givenness of quite partial redefinitions of the global scale, usually in economic or cultural terms. The overall point is that spatial scales are created and transformed in the flux of social processes; they represent periodic but more or less lasting fixations of social process into spatial form. Spatial scales have palpable existences, and as such they in turn contribute to the organization of social flows. Spatial scales are not synonymous with spatial differentiation; the production of spatial scale does not in itself create the borders between recognizably distinct places. Rather the production of scale provides a framework, a technology for organizing spatial differences, for identifying places as distinct from each other; it provides a metric for drawing social, political, and economic boundaries in the landscape. The production of spatial scale is therefore a highly political process, just as political as the processes by which histories are divided, conceptually and in practice, into periods, eras, epochs, and the like. Which kinds of spatial borders count as significant is just as important (and just as political) as discerning which social events mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. In abstract terms, spatial scales are the outcome of social struggles; the production of scale demarcates the sites of social contest. Scales represent the territorial resolution of competing social forces. Scales on the one hand provide the spatial technology for containing specific kinds of social activity and claims at one level rather than another—an urban revolt that is contained in one or more cities but never goes regional, a regional revolt that never goes national, and so forth. On the other hand, the establishment of specific scales provides a means of empowerment. The simultaneous usurpation and transformation of the physical and social infrastructure of a city can provide a power base for social change (e.g., the Paris Commune) or for defense of the status quo, as in the case of a siege. If the production of scale fixes certain social relations into the landscape over a shorter or longer period, spatial scales are nonetheless themselves highly mutable. The social relations and social functions that congeal to produce a specific scale may (indeed inevitably do) undergo transformation and in the process find themselves “rescaled”; social relations and functions that operated at one level can over time operate on a new scale or scales. Consider the scale of the national state. The sixteenth-century city-states of southern Europe eventually found that with their economic activities expanding

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geographically, the political and military functions associated with the citystate were increasingly circumscribed in their ability to regulate and defend the trade on which the state depended. There was no easy evolution from the city-state to the nation-state—far from it; it was a brutal affair (Arrighi 1993). And there were many messy alternative forms of the state, from kingdoms to clanships, provinces to duchies. But the central point is that the long-term rescaling of the state from the urban to the national scale was itself an expression of the expanded scale of early capitalist accumulation. The conjoining of state functions with the manufacturing of the national scale involved intense social and political struggles and massive force, primitive accumulation, colonization, and decolonization and was never entirely completed. The construction of the national scale and the division of the globe into national economies, polities, and cultures represented a crucial territorial compromise between opposing forces of social cooperation and those of competition. On the one hand, economic competition required access to resources, markets, and trade at an expanded scale, certainly well beyond that of urban mercantile economies. On the other hand, the provision of the infrastructure for production and trade—roads, marketplaces, laws of exchange and property rights, labor laws, means of social control, provisions for social reproduction, etc.—all required extraordinary degrees of cooperation among the owners of capital, who would otherwise compete with each other. The form and scale of that cooperation was a tense political issue, and it generally mobilized cultural identities as much as economic and political interests. Precisely this conundrum was famously recorded in the Federalist Papers around the construction of the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, but it was equally at the root of British debates around the uniting of myriad connected local administrations into a single “India,” the division of Egypt from Sudan, the post-1919 amalgamation of Yugoslavia, not to mention the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The nationalization of the state therefore both expanded the field of capital accumulation and internalized cooperation over certain infrastructural necessities. The policing of city borders was eroded while the policing of national boundaries was eventually, if at first unevenly, enhanced. Foreign policy, which had often been the prerogative of city-states, was rescaled, becoming increasingly a national scale responsibility. Although largely invisible to our daily purview, therefore, the production of scale is a matter of extraordinary political import. Following this argument into the present, it is possible to reframe the claims about “the end of nation-states.” It seems clear that we are witnessing another period in which dramatic scale shifts—dramatic rescalings—are occurring. The prerogatives of nation-states do indeed seem in some ways to

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be shrinking, at least in economic terms. Economic borders at the national scale are far more porous to capital, goods, images, ideas, and, in a more limited sense, to people, while at the same time proto-global state institutions are clearly in sight. Witness the newfound power of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization since the 1980s. “National economies,” which were relatively identifiable entities as late as the 1970s, have become less and less valid as means of examining global economic change. The state again seems to be rescaling upward, although in truth this version of global ambition has been on the table since Woodrow Wilson announced his vision of a global Monroe Doctrine—the first moment of U.S. global ambition—and especially since Franklin Roosevelt’s “new world order” during the second such moment. The latter period was of course the one that spawned the very institutions that now constitute the proto-global state. This upward rescaling of the state is the reality on which “end of the nation-state” arguments are based. In effect, the scale of capital accumulation has outstripped the national scale at which this process was previously organized and managed, and new supra-national institutions are necessary for an effective state. The limits to the “end of the nation-state” arguments should now be equally obvious. They come under at least four categories. First, whatever circumscription of national state prerogatives has occurred, these are in the first place concerned with economic relations. There is no necessary corollary between the nation-state as an economic actor and its political and cultural identity. Second, this loss of economic power by the state at the national level is extraordinarily uneven. Insofar as global power is increasingly geoeconomic rather than geopolitical, the U.S. especially, but also Europe and even Japan, are well-positioned to transform themselves into entrepreneurial states that fit the grooves of the global market. Weaker states in economic terms are, by contrast, far less advantaged against the corrosive demands of the new globalism, but as the cases of Malaysia (after 1997) and China suggest, they are by no means impotent. Third, the economic rescaling of the state toward the global in no way implies the end of the nation-state, even less the end of the nation. The rescaling of power from city-states did not lead to the end of state functions at the urban scale and it certainly did not spell the “end of the city.” Rather it reorganized state power between and among scales, and something similar is underway today. Fourth, the uneven denationalization of state power in economic terms implies virtually nothing about the power of nations in political and cultural terms or indeed the power of national states as military belligerents. It is quite conceivable that a hardening of political and cultural borders could accompany their increased economic porosity.

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All this adds up to a thoroughgoing restructuring of space and scale, a remapping of spatial difference globally. With the shifts going on at the global scale and especially the tilt of power toward the global in the past two decades, the insistence on examining social change in its global context has become de rigeur. But the uneven rescaling of certain functions away from the national scale has not occurred solely upward; it has also gravitated downward. When New York’s erstwhile mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened that the city might have to have its own foreign policy, this was much more than a pathetic boast or a fantasy of global power. At about the same time, and not unrelated to Giuliani’s statement, Barcelona’s former mayor was organizing a group called “Urbs in Orb”—cities in the world—which had as its ultimate goal the establishment of a “United Cities” organization, parallel to the United Nations. No one seriously believes there will be a resurgence of city-states in the global economy, but these events do suggest the newfound power of cities in a global world. Urban administrations increasingly bypass national governments as they fashion their own global economic and cultural policies. Local transformation is therefore integral to global transformation in quite specific ways, and with some sense of the complexity of the spatial and political shifts underway, it is increasingly held that arguments about global change need to be offset by an understanding of the local changes that both follow from the global and are constitutive of them. Since the late 1980s, the nexus of global and local change has dominated much social science research; “global/local” is the new catchword. This has been codified in the language of the “glocal” (Swyngedouw 1997) to signify the intricate interconnections between global and local change. But even this recognition of interpolated scalar shifts is insufficient. More than a decade ago the World Bank itself discovered the importance of the local vis-à-vis the global, and simultaneous global and local marketing is the norm for much multinational production and marketing strategy, from Coca-Cola to Nike. The word “glocal” was actually coined—in English!—by a Japanese automobile company at the end of the 1970s to describe its locational and marketing strategies. The point here is that not only does the emphasis on the power of the global misread the extent and depth of the reproduction of space that is currently afoot. Equally, the binary nexus of global/local also follows certain ideological grooves and misses the complexity of spatial and scalar change that are underway. There is in fact a more thoroughgoing and replete restructuring of spatial scale. The language of global/local has the effect of positing “merely” local oppositions to global change while regional, national, and supra-national alternatives are diminished or else subsumed under the

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catchall term, the local. The insistence on the local as bulwark against the global becomes the ideological mirror image of global discourse: ideological justification for the power, albeit tempered, of the global. What gets missed in this global/local nexus is the complexity of rescalings, the multifaceted ways in which established scalar systems of the postwar period are being reconstructed throughout. The view from the streets of La Paz or from Bombay cannot afford to relinquish the national scale in the struggle against a so-called globalization narrowly defined from New York or London or Tokyo; national power is often a vital way station to something larger (scale empowers and scale contains). In the same way, the view from “minority” racial and gendered identity positions cannot afford to relinquish the scale of the body as a given. Identity politics—struggles over racial, gendered, sexuality-based oppressions—is all about redefining the scalar contours of the body. What constitutes the body? At what scales and in what spaces does it get to “flow”? Who controls the flow? How does meaning get fixed into the scale of the body? These are questions that posit the scale of the body as a political conundrum, but at the same time they posit the urban, national, and global scales as political questions too. The point here is that a simple sense of global/local does not begin to get at the profundity of the shift that is underway. A richer sense of the restructuring of scale is necessary.

Implications for Reconstitutingâ•—Area Knowledge For reconstituting area knowledge, the implications of such conceptualizations of the production of space should now be coming into view. The definition of the areas to be studied is neither stable, neutral, or given, but needs to respond to shifting productions of space and scale. The demarcation of specific areas always expresses politically laden assumptions about how the world is scaled and divided. The designation of Russian and East European Studies was very much a response to the Cold War; the coherence of Latin American Studies expresses the residue of the Monroe Doctrine even though most Latin Americanists today would reject such imperial paternalism; African Studies embodies a clearly racial definition within its geographic specificity insofar as the countries of northern Africa are generally relegated to Middle Eastern Studies because of their Arab populations, and so forth. The demarcation of appropriate areas involves, centrally, the question of who gets included and excluded from any particular “area,” but in practice such geodefinitional squabbles quickly become sterile. Whether, for example, India should or can be covered under the rubric of Asia Pacific Studies when it is certainly a part of Asia but far away from the Pacific allows of no precise

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geographical answer; the question is in practice settled politically. But the implications of the production of space and scale arguments go much deeper than specific questions of inclusion or exclusion. They present a challenge to area knowledge researchers to match their concepts of space and area not just with inherited notions of continental and national division but with the social, economic, cultural, and political flows that are producing new scales of social activity, new spatial entities and divisions, new places. The relatively new pursuit of Asia Pacific Studies, for example, represents a response to academic critiques that sought to get beyond the traditional compartmentalization of Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as radically separate regions. It responds, however implicitly, to the reality of rescaling and clearly opens up the possibilities of richer transnational cultural and social analyses, allowing the recognition of intense transcultural interchange to trump traditional continental divisions. But it also responds to a certain increased intensity in economic and political connections around the Pacific, and as such Asia Pacific Studies also stands potentially available for the production of more instrumentalist forms of knowledge at the service of the state and capital. I make this point not in any way as an indictment. Far from it; all area or geographic knowledge confronts the same insoluble dilemma. Rather, the important point is the thick connection between on the one hand the definition of area and on the other hand the very real shifts in social processes that area knowledge has to account for and represent, however that is to be done. The popular if defensive retort that the geographical divisions between different area studies are merely convenient fictions therefore camouflages one of the central political issues in any pursuit of area knowledge. The convenience of the area categories is not innocent, as it structures knowledge in specific ways and emanates from specific ideological resonances. The fictionality of such categories raises two further questions: Why do we not employ other, alternative fictions, and what is the connection between these supposed fictions and the shifting material geographies they supposedly represent? An appropriate categorization of areas would presumably take account of the very real processes that are transforming both the areas themselves and their overall significance. This is of immediate methodological as much as theoretical importance. To take just one example, in the 1970s it still made considerable sense to examine the trajectory of regional and global economies in terms of aggregate changes in national economies. But by the end of the twentieth century, when more international trade takes place within single corporations than between different companies and the coherence of specifically national economies is diminished, how much is still being captured and

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how much missed when analysis continues to be based on national economic figures (see, for example, Brenner 1999)? One obvious implication of these arguments is that given the pliability and indeed mutability of place and space, a more appropriate research focus may be the social flows themselves. The preceding discussion of scalar shifts and the restructuring of scale provides a way of highlighting additional dynamics and dimensions of such flows. Alert to the extent to which social flows of capital and ideas, goods and images, even people themselves, have intensified in recent years, not to mention the increased attention paid to them, many researchers have indeed shifted their focus to the flows themselves. In the opinion of Manuel Castells (1996–1998), the new post-1970s fluidity of global flows means that our research attention has to turn from what he calls “spaces of place” toward “spaces of flows.” Many geographers since the 1970s have adopted this approach, turning their attention from examining fixed places to analyses of social flows and processes and the ways in which these sculpt places, which in turn become the crucibles of new configurations of social process and social relations. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1999) might well have been summarizing much of this work when he talks of “process geographies.” But the shift toward flows rather than fixed spaces is potentially one-sided and too easy. It admits the fluidity of space only to fix it again, and as the case of Castells suggests, leads too easily toward a despatialized vision of globalization. It is true that social histories make geographies, but the geographies are, by corollary, the crucibles of these histories. This is the importance of an understanding of the production of scale. Thus we can diagnose in the new global economy not simply a one-dimensional weakening of traditional borders, national and otherwise, but a far more complicated restructuring of scales, places, and borders. This has the effect of complicating not just the geography but the historical trajectory we attach to different kinds of social flows. Social flows are still powerfully steered through a highly viscous and uneven geography of scales, places, and borders, albeit a geography historically produced by these same flows. Especially in the light of events since September 11, 2001, there is one dimension of the sociopolitical shifts associated with the restructurings of scale that has a direct bearing on how we conceive of areas. As Erik SwyngeÂ� douw (1997) has so persuasively argued, the rescaling of functions and activities previously associated with the nation-state is intricately associated with a “reworking of the scales of governance” up and down the hierarchy. Nationstates strive to act at a global scale, alongside and often in competition with fledgling but powerful global state institutions. Restructuring the scales of

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governance therefore “becomes an integral part of [state] tactics and strategies to mediate and control tension and social conflict at a variety of scales.” The weakening of nation-states, however uneven, has the potential to diminish state authority over certain facets of social relations and daily life and over certain places and regions, and the consequent vacuum of authority may be filled in various ways by state or nonstate institutions. The rescaled or “hollowed out” state can and does reconstruct new forms and dimensions of its own authority, often “with a decidedly undemocratic and double authoritarian touch, both at the supra-national and localâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›level” (Swyngedouw 1997, 1503). This is in essence what has happened since 2001 especially in the United States, but elsewhere as well. The events of September 11th did not precipitate that shift, which was already in progress, but they did provide an extraordinary opportunity to implement unprecedented levels of preconceived revanchism, domestically and globally. First Afghanistan, then Iraq, became the targets of U.S. military onslaught, while from Guantanamo to the Gaza Strip, and at ports and airports around the world, a broad but racially inspired repression has in many ways reasserted national borders. In the face of such a dramatic if still uneven hardening of national boundaries, definitions, and identities, and with a serious focus on the behavior of the United States acting as a self-proclaimed global police force, the proposition that nation-states are withering away is clearly an obsolete idea. Notions of the production of space and scale provide some of the resources for thinking through the real and often contradictory changes that are taking place. September 11, 2001, may or may not have changed the world, but certainly the responses to it by the Bush administration did. Regarding area knowledge, there were signs that the U.S. government would selectively fund language and other studies focused at first on the Middle East and possibly the post-Soviet republics of southwest Asia. There were also signs that as part of the heightened security apparatus of the U.S. state, Congress would insist on tighter ideological control of the curricula and activities of university programs it funds under Title VI, a backbone of area studies funding. Here I think the distinction between area knowledge, broadly conceived, and area studies as a specific institutional form becomes vital. We may already be glimpsing, then, the outcome of the crisis that has gripped traditional area studies since the 1980s: on the one hand a bifurcation between a highly instrumentalist area studies that adheres to the increasingly narrow ideological agendas of the security state, and on the other an alternative, reconstructed area knowledge that takes its cues from not just geographical theory but the entire raft of theoretical influences—postcolonial, feminist, Marxist, subaltern studies, antiracist,

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queer, poststructuralist, etc.—that informed the critique of area studies in the first place. The latter project will succeed, I would like to argue, to the extent that it does indeed embrace geographical theory, in particular theories of the production of space and scale. As was suggested above, such an explicit respatialization of the ways in which we organize area knowledge opens up the possibility of a creative repoliticization. It will not be easy to apply this level of spatial theory to the basic question of how we redefine specific areas, and it will be even more difficult, once creative regional definitions have been found, to keep them sufficiently fluid to respond to shifts in political, cultural, and economic events and processes. It will also be much more difficult to negotiate a relationship with the more instrumentalist visions of an older area studies, which will be increasingly distant in political terms and yet will command many of the resources for language training. The temptations of a new round of institutionalization are immense. The creativeness of Asia Pacific Studies in this respect provides an open forum within which many of the new and vital theoretical influences can circulate. This research was supported by a Ford Foundation grant, 1010-0549, “Revitalizing Area Studies: Toward a Synthesis.”

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1999. “Globalization and the Research Imagination.” International Social Science Journal 160: 229–238. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1993. “The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism.” In Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, edited by Stephen Gill, 148–185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brenner, Robert. 1999. “Turbulence in the World Economy.” Challenge XLII (3). Castells, Manuel. 1996–1998. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Three volumes. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers. Dalby, Simon. 1991. “Critical Geopolitics: Difference, Discourse and Dissent.” Environment and Planning D Society and Space 9â•›(3): 261–283. Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.â•›W.â•›Norton. Eagleton, T. 1997. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Katz, Cindi, and Neil Smith. 1993. “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics.” In Place and the Politics of Identity, edited by Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 67–83. London: Routledge.

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Kern, S. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Landes, David. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: W.â•›W.â•›Norton and Company. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 2002. Critique of Everyday life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. Translated by John Moore. London and New York: Verso. O’Brien, Richard. 1992. Global Financial Integration: The End of Geography. London: Pinter Publishers. Ohmae, K. 1990. The Borderless World. London: Collins. ———. 1995. The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies. New York: The Free Press. Smith, Neil. 1993. “Homeless/Global: Scaling Places.” In Mapping the Futures. Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by Jon Bird et al., 87–119. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. California Studies in Critical Human Geography, number 9. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Swyngedouw, Erik. 1997. “Neither Global nor Local: ‘Glocalisation’ and the Politics of Scale.” In Spaces of Globalization, edited by K.â•›Cox, 137–166. New York: Guilford Press. Virilio, Paul. 1997. Open Sky. New York: Verso.

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Chapter 3

Locating Asia Pacific The Politics and Practice of Global Division Martin W. Lewis

Our world is a complicated place, almost fantastically so. One could spend

a lifetime learning the intricacies of global geography and still comprehend relatively little. Faced with such staggering complexity, the basic human reaction is to simplify and to schematize. The world is readily comprehensible, we tell ourselves, if we start at the global scale and make a handful of fundamental divisions. If one learns the resulting units, one supposedly gains a basic grasp of world geography. Thus, when first- or secondâ•‚grade students are given their first lessons, they are typically presented with a world map partitioned into six or seven chunks, easily distinguishable from each other by bright, primary colors: Europe is red perhaps, Asia green, Africa blue, and so on. But even at this age, inquisitive students often ask why Europe is differentiated from Asia. On the globe or world map, North and South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica may appear to be separate pieces of terrain, but not Europe and Asia. Later, these same students might discern that when journalists, academics, and politicians use the term “Asia,” they almost never refer to the area that had been so neatly delimited in their secondâ•‚grade class. But what these experts do mean by “Asia” usually remains vague and uncertain. Israel and Syria are generally not included, but what about Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan? Locating Asia turns out to be anything but an elementary issue. Regardless of where “Asia” is located, the larger issue of dividing the world into a handful of fundamental units remains. We regularly and carelessly employ several distinct systems of global division—based on such units as continents, world regions, civilizations, and so on—paying little attention 41

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to where they came from or what they might connote (Lewis and Wigen 1997). Yet all these metageographical schemes (“meta” geographical because they inform discussions of actual geographical patterns) are all of a piece, sharing a common intellectual lineage and encouraging us to imagine the world in a particular manner. The resulting picture is often misleading, preventing us from thinking clearly about some of the key global issues that we are now facing. The inadequacies of our rigid division of the world into a handful of fundamental units have been apparent in certain quarters of academia for some time. In particular, the area studies model—which partitions both the globe and the scholarly communities that examine it around discrete world regions—is reputed to have been in a state of crisis since the 1990s. Admittedly, the underlying reasons for this crisis have been framed more in terms of politics and theory than in those of geographical adequacy. Critics from the left have charged that the area studies edifice has been constructed to enhance the strategic power of the United States, adding that its very categories of analysis are laden with the debris of the Western colonial project (Wallerstein 1997; Cumings 1998; Rafael 1994). Critics from the right have contrarily attacked the supposed liberal bias of area studies scholars, accusing them of undermining U.S. security—a charge that was greatly magnified in the wake of September 11, 2001 (see Kramer 2001; Kurtz 2002). Social scientists, on the other hand, have been more inclined to castigate the area studies approach for encouraging particularistic inquiry that fails to generate rigorous models of human behavior and social organization (Bates 1997). A more general—and compelling—charge against the area studies model is that dividing internationally focused scholars into self-contained area studies communities tends to breed insularity, or, in the words of H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, to “close off the study of a particularâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›unit from the rest of the world” (Harootunian and Miyoshi 2002, 8). Partly as a result of these and other critiques, major funding agencies such as the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council have sought to devise more flexible and innovative ways of examining the world, seeking to cross the borders of the area studies map (Waters 2000; Globalization Project 2002; Gulbenkian Commission 1996; Ford Foundation 1999). While scholars argued about the inherent biases and shortcomings of the area studies scheme, a different—although closely related—metageographical construct has been forced on the public imagination, that of discrete, territorially based civilizations. The civilizational model of the world had been in abeyance for several decades, but it was given new salience with the publication of Samuel Huntington’s (1993; see also 1998) The Clash of

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Civilizations. More to the point, the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq propelled supposedly clashing civilizations to the center stage of public debate. Conservative scholars and pundits, outraged by the supposed leftist bias of the area studies complex (and of academia in general), have been especially inclined to (re) frame the world on a civilizational basis. The resulting pontifications about cross-civilizational discord nicely illustrate the inherent hazards encountered in rigid metageographical thinking. As the ideological framework that ultimately undergirds the distinction between Asia and Europe is found in its starkest form in the separation between Western and Eastern civilization, let us begin by examining critically the discourse on civilizations that emerged in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Rival Civilizations in the New Millennium? In Huntington’s framework, the world is divided into a handful of ancient and necessarily opposed civilizations, each of which is a discrete place that encompasses a unique mental universe. In Huntington’s gloomy vision, Western civilization is all but bound to engage in an epic struggle for global hegemony with its rivals, particularly Islamic civilization and Confucian (or Sinic) civilization. That Osama bin Laden and his operatives saw the world in similar terms, and acted on that vision, indicated to many that Huntington was prescient, having predicted this great confrontation (although his vision of an Islamicâ•‚Confucian alliance has thus far failed rather spectacularly). The popular press proceeded to trumpet the Huntingtonian worldview. The Atlantic Magazine, for example, published a lengthy portrait of the seer, its author confidently contending that “in the decades ahead his view of the world will be the way it really looks” (Kaplan 2001, 68). Conservative scholars and organizations jumped immediately on the bandwagon, arguing that we must rally around in defense of Western civilization, now under concerted attack by its enemies (Martin and Neal 2001).1 The leftist rot of multiculturalism and postmodern relativism must be swept out of the academy, they informed the American public, as nothing short of our survival is now at stake (Locke 2001; Blankley 2005). In their place, many right-wing thinkers have been urging a return not merely to traditional metageographies but also to an underlying schema of old-fashioned geographical determinism, one in which the West is destined to global domination (Landes 1998). Thus Fareed Zakaria, in an otherwise sophisticated work, sees the roots of Europe’s tradition of liberty and political pluralism in its “mountains and rivers” (Zakaria 2003, 36).

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The civilizational model championed by conservatives, however, proves to be of little use for explaining global events after September 11th. True, most Muslims across the world regarded the U.S-led invasion of Iraq as an assault on their faith and, ultimately, their civilization. Yet Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in Iraq had based its ideology largely on a form of nationalist socialism, seeking legitimacy through a constellation of ideas almost entirely of Western provenance. Equally significant is that in the Western world itself, outside of the United States, few have viewed the war in civilizational terms; far more observers have considered it instead a dangerous instance of American imperialism. To truly frame this conflict as a clash of civilizations, one would have to exclude France and Germany, and perhaps Canada as well, from the West, viewing them at best as traitors to the cause. Increasingly, the West—the foundational unit of the civilizational model—is indeed seen as endangered if not actively disintegrating. In the apocalyptic imagination found in one corner of the right wing, Europe is indeed viewed as having so “succumbed toâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›multiculturalism” (Steyn 2006, xxiv) that it has effectively detached itself from the West as it transforms into “Eurabia” (Ye’Or 2005). Taken to its endpoint, such a maneuver reduces the West to the more conservative areas of the United States, thus stripping virtually all geographical content from the original concept. Huntington himself sees the possible civilizational dissolution of the United States because of the weakening of its Anglo-Protestant culture and the lure of “the cosmopolitan alternative” through which “the world reshapes America” (2004, 363). Other policy analysts, meanwhile, envisage a possible “end to the West” in the growing diplomatic tensions between the United States and Europe (Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse 2008)—a maneuver that strips away most of the cultural and historical content from the original concept. Definitional problems surrounding the concept of the West long predate such debates. In the urâ•‚text of the civilizational view, Arnold Toynbee’s (1934–1961) monumental A Study of History, civilizations are defined almost entirely by religion. Thus, according to Toynbee, Western civilization did not originate with the pagan ancient Greeks, but rather coalesced much later through the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church. Toynbee was at least typologically fair, defining all civilizations by the same criteria, although his scheme was not without its patent absurdities (European Jews, he opined, could never be considered Western because of their religion). In the dumbedâ•‚down contemporary version of the civilizational model, however, the West, unlike most other civilizations, is allowed to escape this defining criterion. While Islamic civilization is necessarily defined by faith, its European counterpart is not—otherwise it would have to be called some-

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thing like Western Christian civilization. Of course, Western civilization can be defined in religious terms, but only partially so, since Latin America is usually, and the Philippines almost always, excluded from the realm despite their religious affiliations. A much more common definition of the West looks to such secular features as democracy, free expression, open markets, etc.— features that emerged in opposition to the Catholic establishment that had supposedly created Western civilization in the first place. These two different conceptions of the West—one based on faith, the other on Enlightenment (and ancient Greek) rationality and liberty—are antithetical to each other, yet are deployed identically in the current rhetorical clash of civilizations.2 Some of the most influential expositions of Western exceptionalism after September 11th have been those of the prolific military historian Victor Davis Hanson. In a cover article in American Heritage, for example, Hanson pictures the war on terror in a rigidly metageographical and transhistorical framework (Hanson 2002). As he puts it, “The fight we’re in didn’t begin on September 11th; it started thousands of years ago. It is the struggle between East and West, and history can both encourage and help us—if we read it properly” (Hanson 2002, 36). According to Hanson, Western civilization is uniquely deadly, or militarily gifted, by virtue of its specific forms of social organization. The West’s way of life, which generates a unique Western “way of war,”3 is based on “freedomâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›capitalism, individualism, constitutional government, secular rationalism, and natural inquiry relatively immune from political audit and religious backlash” (Hanson 2002, 42–43). But any honest appraisal of Western history over the past twenty-five hundred years would have to conclude that such attributes have hardly been common, let alone ubiquitous and thus sufficient to define and differentiate the region from other parts of the world. Yet Hanson attributes all instances of European military success to precisely such a constellation of social features, even in instances, such as the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Incan empires, when they were entirely wanting. The West remains the exceptional “civilization” because it is the civilization around which all others are defined. Note that in Hanson’s formulation, the current struggle cannot be one of “Islam versus the West” because he pegs its starting date roughly a thousand years before Muhammad’s birth. Instead, he frames the current war as merely the latest chapter of the ageâ•‚old struggle of the West against everything else, be it the Persians in 500 BC, the Zulus in the 1870s, or the Japanese in the 1940s. Osama bin Laden thus becomes the latest incarnation of antiâ•‚Western reaction, doomed to fail, much like Darius III, before the onslaught of superior Western firepower and social organization.

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While U.S. firepower and military organization are certainly impressive, Hanson’s historical analogy is stretched well beyond the breaking point. The narrative he deploys is far too neat, excluding vast periods and significant episodes from the history of the West: what for example, becomes of the storied Western “way of war” during the soâ•‚called Dark Ages? It is also far too geographically selfâ•‚contained. Even the standard narrative of the rise of the West admits that the rebirth of reason, the casting off of the shackles of scriptural literalism, came initially with the translation of key Arabic texts into Latin, particularly Ibn Rushd’s (also known as Averroes) commentaries on Aristotle. The Enlightenment’s deepest roots, in other words, can quite reasonably be regarded as at least partially Islamic. And it is hardly a secret that the leading lights of the French Enlightenment—Voltaire and Diderot— were deeply influenced by their reading of Confucian civilization, in which they saw a kind of secularism and meritocracy that informed their critique of their own Western society. The simplistic geographical vision forwarded by the contemporary champions of Western civilization is not supportable. The products of complex social evolution and even technological development are reduced to natural essences of one particular place, the West, which is pictured as spatially uniform. Let us consider again Hanson’s take on this issue: Our opponents, he tells us, are “parasitic on Western Civilization” since “cell phones, the internet, [and] frequent flier milesâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›are not indigenous to the Middle East” (Hanson 2002, 44). But if a particular technology can be considered “indigenous” to an area—as if it were some kind of ethnic group—then what exactly is the region to which the cell phone is indigenous? Japan is a better candidate than most parts of the United States, although Finland is admittedly better yet. Or consider the original industrial revolution. Can this really be regarded as a phenomenon of the West per se, rather than as merely one of a very limited part of the West, the English midlands? Industrial processes, after all, were adopted in many parts of Japan long before they had diffused to western Ireland, central Spain, southern Italy, or eastern Poland. Or consider today’s cutting edge of information technology. One can argue that it is more fully “indigenous” to India’s Silicon Plateau around the city of Bangalore (Das 2001) than it is to rural Mississippi, or perhaps even to Manchester. Technological processes, in other words, often diffuse easily outside of their areas of origin, as they have done so for many thousands of years. Of course, social and cultural patterns and practices spread as well, and one can always argue that Japan’s early industrialization and India’s more recent success in high tech reflects their ongoing “Westernization.” But how then do we explain why certain areas of the non-West Westernized much faster than

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many parts of the West itself? The current modernization of many parts of Asia convinces some writers to simply invert the traditional paradigm and frame the West as a once-powerful but now declining region paralyzed by short-term thinking as well as its own arrogance, thus canceling any notion of global Westernization (Mahbubani 2008). In Kishore Mahbubani’s vision, the West is now held back by its deficient “mind,” which tends to “see problems from a black and white perspective” and which finds it “impossibleâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›to conceive of Islamic civilization as reemerging as an open and cosmopolitan civilization” (2008, 203 and 151, emphasis in the original). Although certain ideas and patterns of thought are obviously more common in some parts of the world than in others, it is just as obvious that “civilizations” do not possess minds of their own. Civilizational thinking, however, generally leads to such a reification of its own categories, endowing places with essential traits and treating then as if they were persons. Admittedly, some recent works have adopted a much more critical and sophisticated take on civilizational identity (Hall and Jackson 2007); John Hobson (2007, 2004), for example, “deconstructs the Eurocentric clash of civilizations” by emphasizing the polycultural origins of the West itself. Still, it seems that the best way out of this conundrum is to drop this particular metageographical construction altogether and instead frame issues of modernization and development more directly in social, economic, and technological terms. This does not mean that such processes as industrialization and modernization do not have geographical patterns, but only to admit that geography is not of their essence.

The Continental Map The civilizational scheme at least begins with features specific to humankind rather than with raw geography, even if it does inscribe its “civilizations” quite literally on the map of the world. The same cannot be said for one of the main alternative metageographical systems, that of continents. With continents, one starts with the basic shape of landmasses and then maps upon them a host of putative social, economic, and cultural features—in short, the general attributes of supposed civilizations. Here the geographical fallacy—the notion that the mere physicality of place creates and structures all the various differences that divide up humankind—is encountered in its starkest form. Continents and civilizations do not really stem from rival metageographies. Rather they are sibling schemes that reflect merely a different emphasis: one more cultural, the other more strictly spatial. Both systems structure the

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world in a similar manner and both derive from the same intellectual legacy. The notion of continental division goes back to the ancient Greeks, who differentiated the west side of the maritime passages extending from the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea as Europe and the east side as Asia (somewhat later, they added Libya, or Africa, as a third landmass) (Lewis and Wigen 1997). Note that this division is essentially the same one Hanson sees as structuring our current struggle; the oppositions, Greece versus Persia, Europe versus Asia, Western civilization versus Eastern civilization, and the West versus the rest, are all but variants of a single, overriding idea. The ancient Greeks themselves, however, put relatively little store in the continental scheme they devised and bequeathed to the world. As Greek cities were found in Europe, Asia, and Libya, the division had little cultural content. In the Roman and medieval periods, the threefold continental architecture had little significance at all, being employed largely in obscure geographical treatises. On the Hereford Map, one of the most famous global depictions of the medieval period, the term “Africa” was written directly over the face of Europe—and nobody seems to have much cared (Lewis 1999, 196). The modern idea of continents only began to emerge gradually during the Renaissance. At that time, humanist scholars, hungry for classical precedents and consciously downplaying the theological worldview, wanted a secular substitute for the concept of Christendom, and they found it in the idea of Europe (Lewis and Wigen 1997). Europe thus emerged, or re-emerged, as a spatial referent for a civilizational construct. As European mariners explored the world’s oceans and as conquistadors, merchants, and missionaries began to plant the flags of Europe in foreign lands, the system of continental division slowly grew more complex. First, the Americas were grudgingly granted status as a “fourth quarter of the world:” only much later were Australia and Antarctica given continental distinction. The modern definition of a continent—a discrete mass of land separated, or nearly separated, by intervening waterways—did not really emerge until the turn of the twentieth century. The now largely takenâ•‚forâ•‚granted “fact” that the continents are seven in number, on the other hand, only became fully established in the United States after World War II, and has never been globally accepted. In the continental scheme, Europe is granted exceptional status—just as the West forms the exception in the civilizational view. Europe is by no stretch of the imagination an isolated, or even partly isolated, mass of land. Neither waterways nor mountain ranges separate it from Asia; not only are the Ural Mountains none too formidable, but they disappear altogether in the steppes of Kazakhstan. The continental status of Europe, in short, demands a kind

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of mutually agreed upon fallacy, useful for magnifying the significance of this particular portion of the Earth’s terrain. In the historical imagination of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European scholars, only Europe and its direct offshoots, the neoâ•‚Europes such as the United States, were said to be truly historical; Asian societies, in contrast, were viewed as civilized perhaps, but almost completely stagnant, whereas Africans, Pacific islanders, and others were viewed as belonging more to nature than to human history.

Asia as a Spatial and Cultural Category Asia, in the traditional continental scheme, was a languishing land that had once been Europe’s rival but that had long since been bypassed by the winds of historical change. In the 1800s, European scholars certainly recognized differences within Asia, but these were usually viewed as insignificant, at least when contrasted with the utter disparity between Europe and Asia as a whole. Indeed, Asia’s very diversity has sometimes been seen as a kind of Asian fault rather than a flaw of the European geographical imagination; whereas Europe had succeeded in forging a kind of cultural unity, Asia’s retardation was supposedly reflected in the fact that it had none (Lewis and Wigen 1997, 37). The concept of Asia as a singular natural and historical entity could not be maintained, however, as European knowledge of Asia increased. As early as Hegel one finds a stark division of Asia into eastern and western segments. In Persia, Hegel opined, the European traveler would still find “himself somewhat at home,” but as soon as he crosses the Indus River, “he encounters the most repellent characteristics, pervading every single feature of society” (cited in Lewis and Wigen 1997, 63). What one encounters in Hegel—who, of course, never crossed the Indus—is a reification of direction and distance: the farther east one travels, the more the genius of the West dissipates until, somewhere in what is now Pakistan, it vanishes altogether. One does not need to share Hegel’s bigotry to agree that eastern and western Asia are very different places, with distinctive cultural backgrounds, or even that certain “Europeanlike” characteristics diminish gradually as one leaves western or central Europe to travel eastward. The formal architecture of continents ultimately proves far too simplistic and too rigid to be of any use in human geography. Asia in particular—as a standard continent—simply failed to serve as a useful category of analysis. However, just as the familiar sevenfold continental system was formalized in post–World War II geography texts, the original distinction, that dividing Eurasia into two continents, was being silently abandoned.

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What forced the issue was World War II and the ensuing Cold War. Geopoliticians and military strategists found little use in the continents of textbook geography. Spurred to action by the U.S. government, a body of scholars known as the Ethnogeographical Board quite literally remapped the world, generating in the process the world regions that came to form the framework of the area studies complex subsequently used for global investigation (Lewis and Wigen 1997, 162–166). Europe became Western Europe as Eastern Europe was appended to a Soviet world region that encompassed North Asia; southwestern Asia was grafted on to North Africa to form an expanded Middle East, and the rest of Asia was subdivided into East, South, and Southeast Asia. Most of the new world regions, moreover, continued to be yoked to a continental vocabulary. While western Asia—the original Asia—and northern Asia were now deleted from the continent, the new world regions of East, South, and Southeast (and sometimes Central) Asia remained the constituent subunits of a rump Asia. The academic Association for Asian Studies devotes itself precisely to this region. In the popular imagination, however, the locus of Asia continues to push eastward. Many students, for example, are reluctant to classify even Americans of South Asian descent as “Asian Americans” since, in their vision of the world, “Asians” have to “look Asian”—in other words, they must have distinctive “Asian” eye traits (epicanthal folds and “single” eyelids). The reduction of Asia to its eastern and southern remnant is, however, by no means universal. Many writers continue to refer to the maximal Asia of elementary school geography if they think it might bolster their claims. An otherwise impressive global history of imperialism thus trumpets the Ottoman Empire for its “tri-continental” status (Darwin 2008), while a recent survey of the rise of China and India counts Israel as an Asian country in one throwaway line (Mahbubani 2008, 2). In Stewart Gordon’s When Asia Was the World (2008), even Istanbul—a European city by strict continental criteria—counts as a part of Asia. Yet in practice, when such discussions turn to actual “Asian” issues, their frame of reference generally moves eastward. Kishore Mahbubani (2008) may conceptualize his work for maximal effect as including an entire “hemispheric” Asia, but he largely limits his purview to the more prosperous reaches of East, South, and Southeast Asia, with discussions of China and India occupying the bulk of his text. Recent critiques of unwarranted metageographical assumptions associated with conventional divisions of the world have led some scholars to reexamine the concept of Asia in a more intellectually nuanced manner. Ellen Frost (2008), for example, differentiates separate “Asias” within the supposed continental framework, focusing much of her attention on the economically

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dynamic zone of “Maritime Asia” that she defines as stretching from India to Japan. Frost’s Maritime Asia bears a resemblance to another novel regional category, that of Asia Pacific. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as the new core of global dynamism seemed to be emerging on Asia’s eastern maritime fringe, scholars increasingly referred to the region as Asia Pacific (alternatively, “Asia-Pacific,” “the Asia Pacific,” or “Pacific Asia” [Abegglen 1994]). According to Derek McDougall (2006, 6), this spatial construct was originally promoted by Japan, Australia, and the United States in the 1960s to link East Asia to the wider Pacific realm, and more specifically to legitimize the influence of the United States in East Asian affairs. The term has more recently been geographically deployed in a much broader manner, but most works on “Asia Pacific” retain a distinctly geopolitical cast (for example, Ayson and Ball 2006). As is true for most metageographical constructs, the actual area referred to by the term “Asia Pacific” varies significantly from one writer to another and has long ceased to be tethered in any meaningful way to the Pacific. McDougall includes the landlocked country of Mongolia, but in practice focuses on Asia’s eastern maritime fringe (2006). Vicziany, Wright-Neville, and Lentini, on the other hand, extend the region all the way to doubly landlocked Uzbekistan while excluding virtually all the Pacific from their map of the region (2004, xvi). Manfred Mols (2000, 8) explicitly carries the construct across the ocean to include Latin America’s Pacific fringe, but the book in which his essay is included does not otherwise cover South and Central America. Although Australia and New Zealand are generally included within Asia Pacific (Davies and Nyland 2004; Davison 2004), the islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia rarely are (for a prominent exception, see Heijmans, Simmonds, and van de Veen 2004). As we shall see, even works that drop Asia from their spatial frameworks ostensibly to focus on the Pacific itself often ignore the islands that pepper the ocean’s surface.

Oceanic Geography At first glance, oceans and seas are far less problematic than are continents, world regions, and civilizations. As humankind is primarily a terrestrial species, the watery portions of the world have never been invested with the kinds of cultural significance that have been attached to landmasses. Careful examination, however, shows that many of the intellectual conundrums associated with continents also obtain in the case of oceans. Oceans and seas, simply put, should not be regarded as given units of the natural world. They too have history of intellectual construction.

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One reason why the oceans appear to be simple, natural units is because we habitually look at an image of the world mapped from an equatorial perspective. But if one looks at a world map centered on the South Pole—or better yet, if one merely inverts a globe—then all the oceans appear fully interconnected. For this reason, such nineteenth-century geographers as Élisée Reclus argued that there is really only one ocean centered around the South Pole, albeit with three large, northward extending embayments that we call the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans (Lewis 1999, 207). This is not to argue that Reclus’ vision is “right” and ours is “wrong”; rather, his depiction of a solitary ocean, intercut with a single interconnected Afroâ•‚ Eurasianâ•‚American landmass, was equally ideologically informed, motivated ultimately by a desire to stress the unity of humankind. If one examines the history of oceanic mapping, one cannot help but be struck by the variety of ways the global sea has been conceptualized (see Lewis 1999). In sixteenth-century Europe, “oceans” were typically defined as the waters adjacent to a given piece of terrestrial territory; thus one finds such entities as the Britannic Ocean, Germanic Ocean, and Hispanic Ocean. In the maps of one noted seventeenth-century cartographer (Pierre Desceliers), such “oceans” were depicted as discrete strips of water extending across the Atlantic to North America. In the eighteenth century, world maps typically portrayed individual oceans as wrapping around continental landmasses. Thus one finds an Ethiopian Ocean extending from the southern Atlantic into the western Indian Ocean, and a Magellanic Ocean linking the south Atlantic to the southeastern Pacific. In the nineteenth century, a basinâ•‚centered view of the oceans came to prevail, but most cartographers still divided oceans at the equator, thus distinguishing separate North and South Atlantic and North and South Pacific oceans. The Pacific was not conventionally perceived as a singular ocean until the twentieth century. In earlier times, the westâ•‚central Pacific was more commonly linked to the waters of the Indian Ocean, a sensible view if one is concerned with the shipping routes of the early modern world. The term “Pacific Ocean,” moreover, was often limited to the southeastern portion of the basin, the area where Magellan first bestowed the name. Before the twentieth century, the most common term used for the bulk of the basin was “the South Sea,” reflecting the southern location of the most common entrance to these waters near Tierra del Fuego (Spate 1977). While the term South Sea later faded from everyday usage, its influence persists in the popular habit of referring to the islands of Micronesia, virtually all of which are well north of the equator, as lying in the fabled “South Pacific.”

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Regardless of whether oceanic basins may form natural entities or may be perceived as distinct places, they may still function as regional systems, linking together peoples located on opposing littorals and on intervening islands. Indeed, one of the many responses to the so-called crisis in area studies has been to examine sea and ocean basins as alternative regional frameworks, allowing one to discern spheres of interaction that are obscured by the conventional map of land-based world regions and encouraging one to move away from a static “trait geography” to a more active “process geography” (Lewis and Wigen 1999; Globalization Project 2002). In standard metageographical schemes, for example, the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea are considered utterly disparate, falling into different world regions, continents, and civilizations. But as Fernand Braudel showed in 1949, distinctive aspects of Mediterranean culture have continued to lend a certain unity to the region despite the emergence of competitive communities of faith on the sea’s opposing shores (Braudel 1972). More recently, Mediterranean studies have undergone a wider renaissance, as scholars in a number of disciplines stress the strong geographical linkages that extend across this rather narrow maritime basin (Horden and Purcell 2000; Cooke 1999; King, Proudfoot, and Smith 1997).4 Maritime approaches to regional studies have also been successfully carried out in other parts of the world. Numerous studies have documented, for example, the tightly integrated trade networks that have spanned most of the Indian Ocean basin over the past two millennia, networks that have carried ideas, practices, and peoples as well as commodities to distant shores (Chaudhuri 1985; Risso 1995; Bose 2006). The Atlantic has similarly emerged as a focus of regional studies in its own right (Gilroy 1993; Sacks 1991). Although the two sides of this basin were not effectively linked before 1500, the growth of an early modern global economy relied heavily on the emerging Atlantic networks. Migration, voluntary and forced, from Europe and Africa to the Americas subsequently cemented the development of an Atlantic-focused regional world (or perhaps “worlds”).

The Pacific as Region It is questionable whether the Pacific can be construed as a region in the same way that the Mediterranean or even the Atlantic habitually are. The first issue is merely one of size. Covering roughly one-third of the world, the Pacific is larger than all the continents combined (Flynn, Giráldez, and Sobredo 2002). Its scale, in other words, is of a different order than that

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of any other global division. More significant is its historical lack of transbasin integration. Although ancient Polynesian navigators probably reached South America, from whence they carried back sweet potatoes as far west as New Zealand, sustained crossings of the Pacific had to wait until the sixteenth century. Until the eighteenth century, moreover, such crossings were few and had limited effect; the storied routes of the Manila Galleons, although they did create the first truly global economy (Flynn and Giráldez 1995), were in effect “desert tracks, with the one oasis of Guam” (Spate 1988, 55). Trans-Pacific connections certainly intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the levels of integration never approached those found around smaller maritime basins. The thickening ties across the Pacific of the modern era, moreover, are difficult to disentangle from the more general process of global integration. As a result, argues Jerry Bentley, “maritime history after the sixteenth century resolves into global history” (Bentley 1999, 220). By focusing on the forms of trans-Pacific integration that have emerged, however, one can discern a sphere of regional interaction in the Pacific, albeit one distinctive from those found in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian basins. Historians of the Pacific Rim have emphasized the nineteenthcentury economic ties that linked western North America to eastern Asia, focusing as well on the substantial migration of people from southern China to many segments of the Pacific littoral. The rapid development of California in the mid-1800s, they note, depended crucially on its Pacific connections; some of San Francisco’s earliest housing, both of wood and stone, was literally made in China (Brands 2002, 256; St. Clair 2002, 40). Economic and ecological ties between California and Australia were also vital for the subsequent development of both places (Tyrrell 1999). The late twentieth century, moreover, witnessed a veritable explosion of trade, with the value of trans-Pacific commerce exceeding that of the Atlantic from 1980 (Blank 1999, 265). Cultural exchange followed, resulting, according to Paul Blank, in the development of “mirror cities” paired across the ocean. As a result, for example, “sections of Vancouverâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›[began] to look like Hong Kong” (Blank 1999, 273). Regardless of trade volume, migration streams, or urban mirroring, it is still questionable whether the Pacific as a whole is best viewed as a region in its own right. Large expanses of the ocean’s shores, especially in the northwest (maritime Russia), have, after all, contributed little to trans-Pacific integration. It is for good reason that skeptical authors have seen more hype than perspicuity in much writing about the contemporary Pacific, regarding it as

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little more than a “utopic discourse of the liberal market” that creates a kind of mirage by focusing on a limited “capitalist archipelago” (Wilson 2002, 235, 244). As noted above, the most important lacuna in much of this discourse is the islands of the Pacific themselves (or at least most of them); how often, for example, are the Solomon Islands discussed in writings of contemporary Pacific integration? Certainly in the sizable Pacific Rim discourse, the Pacific itself along with its myriad of islands, is almost by definition excluded, viewed as the intervening space that was being progressively conquered through advanced transportation and communications (Dirlik 1993). The idea that the Pacific Rim forms a crucial region in the emerging world order has recently proved attractive to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, ranging from poetics (Gray 2006), to political science (Dalton and Shin 2006), to cultural history (Miller and Roche 2007), to urban studies (Li 2006), to conventional economics (Ito and Rose 2006), to critical economics (Palat 2004). None of these studies, however, examines the full rim of the Pacific. Some hardly extend their concern out of eastern Asia (Ito and Rose 2006; Palat 2004; Chen 2005; Dalton and Shin 2006), others focus largely on Australia and New Zealand (Miller and Roche 2007), and one encompasses such non-Pacific locations as New York and Toronto (Li 2006). Randall Doyle goes so far as to explicitly limit his use of the term “Pacific Rim” to the Asian side of the basin (2007, xviii). Few recent studies include the Latin American oceanic fringe in any substantive sense (for a prominent exception, see Barclay and Peake 2005). In short, it seems that the term “Pacific Rim” forms a more compelling topic than the actual geographical space of the lands that border the Pacific Ocean. Yet the geographically partial nature of discourse on the Pacific Rim is hardly surprising, as many areas that border the great ocean have contributed little to trans-Pacific integration. The Pacific Rim as a whole is simply too vast and far-flung to form a coherent region. When examining a globe, for example, one cannot find a vantage point from which the entire basin can be seen; if one peers down on the equatorial central Pacific, for example, California, eastern Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea are clearly visible, but Asia remains out of view while Chile lies in an entirely different hemisphere. For this reason, it may be preferable to write of “Pacific Rimlands” rather than of “the Pacific Rim” per se. In historical and anthropological works that focus on the Pacific itself rather than on its rim, islands and archipelagoes necessarily play a prominent role. Here, perhaps, we encounter the major difference between the regional structure of the Pacific and those of other maritime basins. For the

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Mediterranean and Atlantic, islands are crucial, if not emblematic, elements of the larger system; where would Atlantic studies be, one might ask, were it not for the islands of the Caribbean as well as the Canaries and the Azores? One finds, in other words, little disjunction between studies of the Atlantic and studies of the Atlantic Rim. In regard to the Pacific, to the contrary, the disconnection between the oceanic island realm (excluding the continental islands of East and Southeast Asia) and the perimeter is profound. As a result, discussions of the Pacific world generally focus on one or the other area, but rarely on both (for a prominent exception, see McEvedy 1998). With the partial exception of such large island groups as Hawai‘i and New Zealand, the oceanic archipelagoes and the rimlands of the Pacific often seem to form separate regional worlds.

Regional Identities It is, however, a bit beside the point to worry about whether the Pacific can or should be regarded as one, two, or several regional entities. Regions are by their very nature imprecise designations, imperfectly construed by the human imagination. As imaginations necessarily vary, divergent regional schemes will always remain in competition. But while all our major geographical divisions are constructs rather than natural givens, they are not therefore unreal or even arbitrary (see Agnew 2000). To the extent that people conceptualize an area that they call Asia, then that Asia—whatever shape it may have—has a very real cognitive existence, one that can influence the course of human history. During the Second World War, for example, Japanese military planners ultimately sought dominance over all of Asia. Seeing themselves fundamentally as an Asian people, they imagined a virtually divine mandate to expel the European interlopers. Grappling with the “Asiatic” religion of Islam proved to be a bit of a challenge, however, as at least one strategist naively called for Mecca to be relocated to Singapore so as to be more easily controlled by the imperial Japanese forces (Lewis and Wigen 1997, 72). During the postwar period, the newly minted world regions or areas began to take on a cognitive life of their own. A prime case in point is Southeast Asia, a regional designation that was not used, at least in its current sense, before the 1940s. Subsequently, however, Southeast Asian political elites came to view the geopolitical positions of their own countries in terms of this new construct. During the Cold War, the capitalistâ•‚oriented states of the region banded together to form ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,

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informally oriented to thwart the spread of communism out of former French Indochina. Countries defined as belonging to other world regions, such as Sri Lanka, were denied consideration for membership (Lewis and Wigen 1997, 169). And as the Cold War itself ended, all Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, were eventually invited into the ASEAN club. So perhaps one could say that a kind of Southeast Asian identity can be found today in Southeast Asia, but it is still questionable whether such an identity is ever felt very deeply or indeed whether it can be found at all below the level of high state politics. One of the most important attributes of identity, or ethnicity, is that it tends to be highly contextual and multiscalar. Who one is, in other words, often depends on where one is, whom one is with, and what is happening at the time. In investigating ethnicity in the highlands of northern Luzon some twenty years ago, I discovered that in dayâ•‚toâ•‚day interactions people strongly identified with their individual hamlets, but when they went to market towns or engaged in ritual actions, the locus of their identity shifted to their larger village communities (Lewis 1991). Only when they found themselves in more fully multiethnic situations, as when visiting the provincial capital, did they identify themselves as Kankanaâ•‚ey, the ethnic group (or “tribe”) to which they ostensibly belong. Yet at the same time, virtually everyone there strongly identified themselves at the national level as Filipinos, taking umbrage at those lowlanders who sometimes exclude the nonâ•‚Christian mountaineers from the nationality. No one, however, would have called themselves “Southeast Asians.” The one context in which such a “world regional identity” does come into daily play, however, is in immigrant communities in cosmopolitan places, such as many parts of the United States. In such a circumstance, identity can sometimes be lodged at a fairly high level of abstraction. One can thus find in many American universities associations of South Asian students, groups identifying themselves around common origins in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. But such identity is not without controversy, as it can come into conflict with alternative identities defined according to other geographies. An article and exchange of letters in the New Republicâ•›5 illustrates nicely the possible sources of contention. Some South Asian Americans, evidently, object to such a classification, since it implies a fundamental unity between India and Pakistan. To those who favor either a civilizational model or a strongly nationalistic one, such an identity is untenable. We are Indian Americans, some argue, and they are Pakistani Americans. Those, on the other hand, who favor a more historical and cultural, and less political and sectarian, view cannot avoid stressing the linkages between

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India and Pakistan. Cross the border from Pakistan’s Punjab to the Indian state of Punjab and the languages remain the same, as does the diet, forms of music, and most other aspects of quotidian culture. But does this necessarily mean that South Asia should be regarded as a basic and unproblematic unit, one of the fundamental building blocks of the world map? Not necessarily; continue traveling southward through India, and one finds that the language changes, the food changes, the music changes, and so on. Punjabi culture, in other words, may span the Indiaâ•‚Pakistan border, but it certainly does not infuse all of South Asia. One can argue, of course, that other elements of life do unite all (or virtually all) of South Asia. I find such arguments compelling enough to routinely employ the concept of South Asia when lecturing on world geography. But I would also hope to convey to students alternative schemes, showing them some of the numerous historical and cultural linkages that cut across the boundaries of the construct called South Asia. One could talk, for example, of the Southeast Asian affinities of the peoples of northeastern India, or of the profound connections between northern South Asia and what has been called the Turkoâ•‚Persian realm of Central Asia (Canfield 1991). Probably the best way, however, in which to unsettle the category of South Asia, as well as that of Hindu civilization, is to examine the historical maritime linkages of the southwestern Indian state of Kerala. Students in the United States are often astounded to learn that not only is some 25 percent of Kerala’s population Christian, but that Christianity here dates back some 1,800 years, far longer than it does in northern Europe. Students are also surprised to learn about Kerala’s Jewish community, which, although much diminished today, was once strong enough to control its own minor principality, and yet also to encounter the great strength of Islam in one of the few parts of India that was never under sustained Muslim rule (Woodcock 1967, 125). To understand such seeming oddities, it is necessary to understand how deeply Kerala was, and to some extent still is, embedded in the maritime networks of the northern Indian Ocean (Chaudhuri 1985, 1991). This was once a region in its own right, one marked by cosmopolitanism, a mercantile orientation, and the constant exchange of ideas and belief systems. It was through the Indian Ocean trading system that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam entered Kerala; once there, however, they became fully incorporated into the state’s own unique social system and cultural milieu. Thus, despite the arguments of Hindu nationalists, Christianity must be regarded as fully “indigenous” to India—or at least to this part of India—as it is to any other portion of the world.

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Conclusion All the metageographical schemes that we routinely deploy distort our vision of the world in important ways. But how can we even think about the world without recourse to such spatial categories as “Asia” and “the Pacific”? At one level, we cannot, and I certainly would neither expect nor desire either term to be expunged from our vocabularies. But we can inculcate a more nuanced, ultimately more accurate, and less prejudicial vision of the world by consistently questioning our categories of metageographical discourse. To do so requires that we first admit that none of the main spatial units that we use to think about the world are foundational in any sense. Instead, all our major geographical divisions are intellectual constructs rather than givens of the natural world. This applies to all the soâ•‚called continents, not merely the seemingly anomalous “landmasses” of Europe and Asia. Why is Australia a continent, and Madagascar merely a large island? Why does the continent of Australia almost never encompass New Guinea, which is clearly on the same landmass if one includes the continental shelf? If one turns to tectonic plates, the actual geophysical building blocks of the earth’s crust, one would actually have to classify Australia together with India. In conclusion, let us consider a few basic principles of an alternative view of world geography—alternative, that is to the conventional vision that divides the globe into a small number of fundamental units, be these defined as continents, civilizations, world regions, or oceanic rims. To begin with, this alternative view embraces complexity and admits that no one can ever understand but a small fraction of the basic attributes of world geography. One of the main reasons geography is so complex is because it is necessarily multiscalar. The important unit—the one most essential for identity, political affiliation, or what have you—can be as small as a neighborhood or as large as a putative civilization. A sophisticated geographical understanding requires one to be able to move fluidly between these various scales, acknowledging that in different contexts different levels of analysis gain salience. A developed geographical imagination also admits that it is necessary to regionalize—to divide the world into distinct regions, all of which in turn must be divided and subdivided. One can hardly talk about the world if one cannot use such terms as Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Pacific. But at the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge that such regions are intellectual constructs, not entirely arbitrary units made out of whole cloth, but rather possible and partly justifiable ways of divvying up both the terrestrial and

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aqueous realms. We ought thus always to entertain—to play with—alternative, overlapping, noncongruent regionalization schemes, paying particular attention to dynamic border zones, such as those found in many of the Pacific Rimlands (see Chen 2005). And finally, a sophisticated geographical vision would overlay upon the entire globe complex webs, networks through which all manner of ideas, practices, and peoples—whether migrants, sojourners, or tourists—flow across national, regional, or, if you will, civilizational boundaries.

Notes 1.╇ Martin and Neal (2001, 6) go so far as to argue that when universities added courses on Islam and other aspects of nonâ•‚Western culture after September 11th, they “reinforced the mindset that it was America—and America’s failure to understand Islam—that was to blame.” In their view, the only patriotic response in academia would be to return to “strong core curricula that include rigorous, broadâ•‚based courses on the great works of Western Civilization” as well as courses on the United States (2001, 7). 2.╇ Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan has dusted off a view of the West that had seemed to be virtually extinct, one founded on supposed racial differences (Buchanan 2002). To Buchanan, Mexican immigrants to the United States present a threat to Western civilization merely by virtue of the fact that they are not primarily of European descent. See also Huntington 2004. 3.╇ Hanson’s idea of a distinctive “Western way of war,” is developed in his book of the same title (Hanson 2000). His basic thesis is that Western peoples have, since the time of the ancient Greeks, preferred direct, frontal attacks while waging war, whereas other peoples have more often preferred to conduct skirmishes. But virtually all of Hanson’s evidence pertains to ancient Greece (the actual subject of the book); for the rest of “the West,” a similar “Western way of war” is just assumed. In actuality, Western peoples have often fought in a “nonâ•‚Western” manner, just as nonâ•‚Western peoples have often fought in a “Western” manner. The closest parallel in modern times to the Spartan manner of warfare was probably that of the Zulus. For an exploration of the similarities between Zulu and early medieval European sociomilitary organization, see Geary 2001, 157–174. 4.╇ Horden and Purcell (2000, 19), however, contend that the Mediterranean is still unduly ignored. If so, their book does much to rectify the situation. 5.╇ See Sarah Wildman’s Washington Diarist, “All for One,” in the December 24, 2001, issue of the New Republic and the letter to the editors of the same journal by Mihir Meghanti, February 11, 2002, page 41.

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References Abegglen, James C. 1994. Sea Change: Pacific Asia as the New World Industrial Center. New York: The Free Press. Agnew, John. 2000. “Disrupting the Nature of the International: Geographies of Sameness and Difference.” In Beyond the Area Studies Wars: Toward a New International Studies, edited by Neil L. Waters, 137–154. Hanover and London: Middlebury College Press. Anderson, Jeffery J., G.â•›John Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse, eds. 2008. The End of the West: Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Ayson, Robert, and Desmond Ball. 2006. Strategy and Security in the Asia Pacific. London: Allen and Unwin. Barclay, Kate, and Wayne Peake, eds. 2005. Globalization, Regionalization and Social Change in the Pacific Rim. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadelajara, and Sydney: University of Technology Sydney Press. Bates, Robert H. 1997. “Area Studies and the Disciplines: A Useful Controversy?” Political Science and Politics 30:166–169. Bentley, Jerry H. 1999. “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis.” The Geographical Review 89:215–224. Blank, Paul W. 1999. “The Pacific: A Mediterranean in the Making?” The Geographical Review 89:265–277. Blankley, Tony. 2005. The West’s Last Chance: We Will Win the Clash of Civilizations. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing. Bose, Sugata. 2006. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Brands, H.â•›W. 2002. The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream. New York: Doubleday. Braudel, Fernand. 1972 [1949]. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper and Row. Buchanan, Patrick J. 2002. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Our Civilization. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Canfield, Robert, ed. 1991. Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaudhuri, K.â•›N. 1985. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chen, Xiangming. 2005. As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces in the Pacific Rim. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Cooke, Miriam. 1999. “Mediterranean Thinking: From Netizen to Medizen.” The Geographical Review 98:290–300. Cumings, Bruce. 1998. “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War.” In Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, edited by C.â•›Simpson, 159–188. New York: New Press. Dalton, Russell J., and Doh Chull Shin. 2006. Citizens, Democracy, and Markets around the Pacific Rim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, John. 2008. After Tamerlane: A Global History of Empire Since 1405. London: Bloomsbury Press. Das, Gucharan. 2001. India Unbound. New York: Knopf. Davies, Gloria, and Chris Nyland. 2004. Globalization in the Asia Pacific: Impacts and Consequences. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar. Davison, Remy. 2004. “Introduction.” In The New Global Politics of the Asia Pacific, edited by M.â•›Conners, R.â•›Davison, and J.â•›Dosch, 1–16. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Dirlik, Arif, ed. 1993. What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Doyle, Randall. 2007. America and China: Asia-Pacific Rim Hegemony in the Twentyfirst Century. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. Flynn, Dennis O., Arturo Giráldez, and James Sobredo, eds. 2002. Studies in Pacific History: Economics, Politics, and Migration. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. 1995. “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origins of World Trade in 1571.” Journal of World History 6:201–221. Ford Foundation. 1999. Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies. New York: Ford Foundation. Frost, Ellen L. 2008. Asia’s New Regionalism. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Geary, Patrick J. 2001. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. PrinceÂ� ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Globalization Project. 2002. The Globalization Project at the University of Chicago. . Gordon, Stewart. 2008. When Asia Was the World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Gray, Timothy. 2006. Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Gulbenkian Commission on Restructuring the Social Sciences. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on Restructuring the Social Sciences. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Hall, Martin, and Patrick T. Jackson. 2007. Civilizational Identity: The Production and Reproduction of “Civilizations” in International Relations. Houndsmill Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hanson, Victor Davis. 2000. The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece, 2d ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ———. 2002. The Longest War. American Heritage (February/March): 36–46. Harootunian, H.â•›D., and Masao Miyoshi, eds. 2002. Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Heijmans, Annelies, Nicola Simmonds, and Hans van de Veen, eds. 2004. Searching for Peace in Asia Pacific. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Deconstructing the Eurocentric Clash of Civilizations. In Civilizational Identity: The Production and Reproduction of “Civilizations” in International Relations, edited by Martin Hall and Patrick T. Jackson, 149–165. Houndsmill Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell. Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research. Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 22–49. ———. 1998. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 2004. Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ito, Takatoshi, and Andrew K. Rose, eds. 2006. Monetary Policy and Very Low Inflation in the Pacific Rim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kaplan, Robert D. 2001. “Looking the World in the Eye.” The Atlantic Monthly (December): 68–82. King, Russell, Lindsay Proudfoot, and Bernard Smith. 1997. The Mediterranean: Environment and Society. New York: Arnold. Kramer, Martin. 2001. Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Washington D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Kurtz, Stanley. 2002. “Anti-Americanism in the Classroom: The Scandal of Title XI.” National Review Online, May 16, 2002. . Landes, David. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: W.â•›W.â•›Norton and Company. Lewis, Martin W. 1991. “Elusive Societies: A Regionalâ•‚Cartographical Approach to the Study of Human Relatedness.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81:605–626. ———. 1999. “Dividing the Ocean Sea.” The Geographical Review 89:188–214. Lewis, Martin W., and Karen E. Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ———. 1999. “A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies.” The Geographical Review 89:161–168.

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Li, Wei, ed. 2006. From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: New Asian Communities in Pacific Rim Countries. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Locke, Robert. 2001. “The Liberal University: Our Demands.” Front Page, December 4, 2001 (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=5630 FDCD-32B9-4BB1-A01D-2C39006389CB). Mahbubani, Kishore. 2008. The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. New York: Public Affairs. Martin, Jerry L., and Anne D. Neal. 2001. Defending Civilization: How our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It. Washington D.C.: American Council of Trustees and Alumni. McDougall, Derek. 2006. Asia Pacific in World Politics. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner. McEvedy, Colin. 1998. The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Pacific. New York: Penguin. Miller, Caroline, and Michael Roche. 2007. Past Matters: Heritage and Planning History—Case Studies from the Pacific Rim. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Mols, Manfred. 2000. “Asia-Pacific: Why Theory and What Type of It.” In International Relations in the Asia Pacific: New Patterns of Power, Interest, and Competition, edited by J.â•›Dosch and M.â•›Mols, 7–38. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Palat, Ravi Arvind. 2004. Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Rafael, Vicente L. 1994. “The Culture of Area Studies in the United States.” Social Text 12:91–111. Risso, Patricia. 1995. Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Sacks, D.â•›H. 1991. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700. Berkeley: University of California Press. St. Clair, David J. 2002. “San Francisco’s Pacific Exports, 1850–1898.” In Studies in Pacific History: Economics, Politics, and Migration, edited by Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and James Sobredo, 40–60. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. Spate, O.â•›H.â•›K. 1977. “‘South Sea’ to ‘Pacific Ocean’: A Note on Nomenclature.” Journal of Pacific History 12 (4): 205–211. ———. 1988. Paradise Lost and Found. The Pacific since Magellan, vol. III. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Steyn, Mark. 2006. America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing. Toynbee, Arnold J. 1934–1961. A Study of History, 12 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. Tyrrell, Ian R. 1999. True Gardens of the Gods: California-Australian Environmental Reform, 1850–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vicziany, Marika, David Wright-Neville, and Pete Lentini, eds. 2004. Regional Security in the Asia Pacific. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar.

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Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1997. “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies.” In The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, edited by Noam Chomsky, 195–231. New York: New Press. Waters, Neil L., ed. 2000. Beyond the Area Studies Wars: Toward a New International Studies. Hanover and London: Middlebury College Press. Wilson, Rob. 2002. “Imagining Asia-Pacific Today: Forgetting Colonialism in the Magical Free Markets of the American Pacific.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, 231–260. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Woodcock, George. 1967. Kerala: A Portrait of the Malabar Coast. London: Faber and Faber. Ye’Or, Bat. 2005. Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Zakaria, Fareed. 2003. The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. New York: W.â•›W.â•›Norton and Company.

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Part II

Perspectives from Asia and the Pacific

The four chapters in this section move us from theoretical and conceptual concerns surrounding the definitions of area studies and the boundaries of areas studied to more pragmatic issues involved in the institutionalization of area studies in the Asia Pacific region. What happens when area studies, which has its roots in Western neocolonialism and the Cold War, is imported and adapted within the very areas traditionally its object? What happens when we move from the center and acknowledge the voices of the periphery and semiperiphery of the “academic world system”? Lonny Carlile shows, for example, that the development of area studies in Japan, as in the United States, had its origins in a colonial project and has since been shaped by national and foreign policy interests. But because Japan is primarily an economic rather than a military power, area studies in Japan “is oriented to revealing the mechanics of regional processes in order to generate technical solutions to regional issues.” Research and teaching on foreign areas is dominated by disciplinary approaches, and for the most part, Japanese area studies aspires to be scientific. More focused on environmental sciences, engineering, and other applied pursuits than cultural difference, Carlile suggests that Japanese cultural studies presents an alternative model for the field.

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Carlile points out two significant exceptions to this generalization. First, consistent with the modernization of the Japanese university system, with its faith in the universality of Western science and knowledge, research on the cultural characteristics of area studies paradoxically focused on Japan itself; and second, research on North America or Europe was more typically dominated by humanities, social science, and cultural studies scholarship. Carlile analyzes data on curriculum and courses to show, however, that there has been a rise in the Japanese cultural imagination of the Asian other (albeit predominantly East Asian). The government has pursued a policy of internationalizing Japanese institutions, and since Japan is Asia’s only advanced industrial society, the government sees the recruitment of foreign students as both a regional responsibility and means to develop international goodwill. With the reform of the university system in the 1990s a new area studies curriculum emerged, and even a new international university dedicated to study of the the Asia Pacific region—Ritsumeikan’s Asia Pacific University (APU), which was founded in Beppu in the year 2000. It remains to be seen, however, whether these initiatives, which are predominantly oriented toward business and tourism, will effectively integrate with the dominant disciplinary approaches and bridge the gap between science and humanities that is so characteristic of Western area studies. Jeremy Eades is less concerned with the institutional history of area studies in Japan and more focused on the nature and potential of the ongoing “radical experiment” at APU, which he sees as the outcome of a national policy agenda to market a higher education product in the Asia Pacific region. He begins by reviewing definitions of the region, and he echoes Martin Lewis (chapter 3) when he identifies a core Pacific Asia and extended Asia Pacific, or “amoeba-like regions.” Definitions become critical, however, when one considers the impact on resources involved, especially bibliographical and linguistic, and also the nature of the research questions asked. Other specific problems with the new area studies include the lack of coherence in the new curriculum and the still limited recruitment of foreign students. One response to this has been increasing collaboration with foreign institutions in research and teaching, such as the kind explored in the next section of this volume. There remain the problems of language barriers and the structure of the academic labor market, but Eades recognizes the potential complementarities of American and Asian area studies. One might ask where the Pacific would fit in all this, which is exactly the question that concerns Teresia Teaiwa in chapter 6. For her, the very term Asia Pacific, as Arif Dirlik also points out, is fraught with enormous

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differentials in power and wealth that are the legacy of Western and Asian colonialism. Teaiwa asks us whether this articulation of areas is really open to considerations of colonialism, histories of labor migration, multiculturalism, hybridity, and indigeneity. Teaiwa insists that a genuine Pacific Studies must take a comparative interdisciplinary approach, and she laments much of what presently passes for regional study as only national or ethnic in focus, without any methodological consistency. Pacific Studies has traditionally been dominated by nonnative scholars applying Western disciplinary approaches, although it has recently been challenged by indigenous and postcolonialist scholarship. Pacific Studies must acknowledge indigenous perspectives but should also be resolutely critical, ensuring that native and national empowerment is for the purposes of exchange and dialogue. She provocatively suggests that Hawaiian and Maori studies, for example, should be characterized as indigenous/ native studies rather than Pacific Studies, raising questions from a radically different perspective about the privileging of the nation-state in area studies. Still, she insists that Pacific Studies cannot be ethnocentric or nationalistic! Teiawa concludes that consideration of the possibility of an articulated Asia Pacific creates an opportunity for Pacific scholars “to take stock and sort ourselves out.” In the final chapter in this section, Lily Kong provides an administrator’s perspective on institutional collaboration, with a particular focus on the experience of the National University of Singapore. She nicely puts into a broader institutional context the specific collaborative pedagogical projects discussed in the next section of the book. To the administrator, collaborative projects promise improvement of her staff’s teaching portfolios, the potential spinoff of research, enhanced institutional reputation, and the possibility of increased graduate student recruitment. Although collaborative instruction depends upon the degree of personal commitment of participants—“people made the difference”—institutional commitments and appropriate reward structures are necessary to sustain them over the longer term. There are a number of tensions that structure international collaboration, including “top down” versus “bottom up” management of interaction; the clash of institutional cultures and the asymmetry of relations in international higher education; and the conflict in individual and institutional priorities, such as between research, consulting, and teaching. Many of these issues are explored in the following section of the book, which documents our collective experience with international collaboration in area studies pedagogy. Lily Kong herself raises the specter of essentialism

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that seemed to haunt interactions between students in Singapore and Hawai‘i when she mentions the contrast between the “hard-working NUS student and more relaxed UHM student.” This surely brings home the lesson that the project of knowing the other as an object of study is based upon the power to objectify, a power that is unequally distributed within what we might call the economy of alterity.

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Chapter 4

The Evolution of “Area Studies” in Japan The Impact of Global Context and Institutional Setting Lonny E. Carlile

T

he evolution of “area studies” and its current status in Japan, though often overlooked, represents a useful frame of reference for discussing the dynamics of knowledge, power, and pedagogy in Asia Pacific Studies more generally. One basic reason is that Japan is a major site of knowledge production in the Asia Pacific region, and any mapping of such activities that fails to take this into account will be woefully incomplete. Also, Japan’s university system arguably represents the first full-fledged modern national institutional infrastructure of this type to develop outside of the West. Japan’s experience provides insight into the dynamics of area studies development in the nonWest and can help us understand the wider field of study. With these considerations in mind, this chapter provides an overview of the development of area studies in Japan. The term “area studies” will be used loosely here to refer to any institutionally organized effort in an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary format that consciously seeks to generate, through research or teaching, knowledge about specific geographic areas of the world. This loose definition has been adopted to track the developmental trajectories of area-based knowledge, even when they evolve into forms that deviate substantially from more conventional understandings of what constitutes area studies. And while the term chiiki kenkyū (area studies or, alternatively, “regional research”) is commonly understood to be the Japanese counterpart of the English term “area studies,” the survey presented here will include efforts that are not necessarily understood to be chiiki kenkyū. A distinction will be made, however, between area studies and “international 71

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studies” in a manner consistent with conventional American usage, with the latter term used to refer to research and teaching focused on international interactions more generally. To highlight features of the Japanese case, implicit and explicit comparisons will be made with the better-known and better-documented developmental trajectory of area studies in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe. The development of area studies in the United States has been strongly shaped by the national interests and position of the United States in the global system (e.g., Cumings 2002, Wiley 2001). As will be demonstrated here, the same argument can certainly be made for Japan, and key forces shaping the development of Japanese area studies are remarkably similar to those at work in the United States and in Western European countries. The interesting point, though, is that Japan’s position in the global system has been and continues to be distinctive, and for that reason the character and trajectory of Japanese area studies has accordingly diverged in certain respects from the Western examples.

Area Studies before World War II It is not an overstatement to say that the very process of Japan’s modernization following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was an exercise in “area studies.” Motivated by security concerns stemming from the encroachments of Western imperialism and colonialism in East Asia, legions of government officials and government-sponsored scholars and students of various types engaged in “fieldwork” in Western Europe and North America. The aim was to understand the institutions of Western societies and the essence of Western culture, with the ultimate objective of securing Japan’s status in the late nineteenthcentury international system. What distinguished this exercise from the norm of American area studies of the latter half of the twentieth century was the way this exercise turned the self-other relationship on its head. As the process unfolded, the “other” of this exercise came to be normalized and lost much of its “otherness,” while Japanese culture was “orientalized.” Specifically, Japan quickly accepted the notion that Western knowledge and methods were of a modern and universal character fundamentally different from that of more parochial traditions found elsewhere in the world. This was reflected linguistically, for instance, in the near disappearance from common use of the term yōgaku (literally, “Western studies”), which had been widely used in the years immediately preceding and following the Restoration. Institutionally, the normalization of knowledge about the West was embodied in the establishment of an educational system and curriculum modeled after Western referents and, in particular, in the establishment of a university

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system under state direction. The latter was specifically designed “to raise up as rapidly as possible the bureaucratic, technocratic, and academic elite” together with “the fund of modern scientific and technological knowledge needed to bring Japan abreast with the Western powers” (Education Minister Mori Arinori as paraphrased in Hall 1975, 306). Put another way, Japan’s universities, with the flagship University of Tokyo at its apex, were to serve primarily as sites where the intellectual output of the West could be accessed and consumed locally as universal knowledge. The flip side of the mainstreaming of “Western Studies” was the orientalization of Japanese culture in the university system and a tendency to treat the study of Japan as something akin to an “area studies” case. The acceptance of the universality of Western scientific knowledge led Japanese intellectuals to view their own national culture as a distinctive “other” whose difference required explanation using the scientific interpretive methods developed in the West (Morris-Suzuki, 1998, 65–78). Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that when ethnographic methods were first introduced in the 1920s and 1930s they were immediately applied to the study of Japan’s own periphery, and these studies in turn came to occupy the largest part of Japanese ethnographic output (Kokuritsu Minzoku Hakubutsukan 1984). Nor did it take long for Japanese anthropologists and the public in general to direct a romanticizing anthropologist-style gaze toward “primitives” in the Pacific islands and other areas (Yamashita 2000). If modernization put Japan on a course already traversed by the West, it was also an instance of “late development” that required traveling the trajectory faster and with more limited resources. These circumstances also left their mark on Japan’s area studies development. In considering this point, it is useful to recall the way metropolitan status and colonial expansion shaped the production of area knowledge in Western Europe and the United States before World War II. On the one hand, accumulated national wealth in these countries allowed the luxury of maintaining in universities philologists of the “Orient,” whose work filled no apparent national need. On the other, the project of subduing and exploiting colonial territories created a demand for more practical knowledge about these areas, while colonial rule itself produced an accumulation of area studies knowledge through the preparation by colonial officials of field reports of various kinds. At times, these two aspects of area knowledge production intersected, as in the work of French field scholars in “discovering” Angkor Wat. A common modality for promoting state projects in “late developmental” Japan was to make the best use of limited state resources by delegating responsibilities to semipublic corporations and other quasi-state institutions. The effect of Japan’s “late development”

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on the development of area studies was to encourage a distinctive semiprivate realm of pragmatically oriented knowledge production relating to colonized areas. As noted earlier, Japan’s university system was established primarily as a conduit to channel the ostensibly advanced knowledge of the West to advance Japan’s own national development. The strength of this impetus was such that, in the words of Ivan Hall, the Japanese university system was organized in a way that was “not congenialâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›to the cultivation of humanistic, general educational, interdisciplinary approaches” (Hall 1975, 306). A Japanese university was composed of the following “faculties”—units that can be considered loose counterparts of an American university “college” or “school”: law, engineering, science, medicine, agriculture, literature, and, later, economics. In keeping with the pragmatic, developmental orientation, the bulk of these faculties focused on applied, technical fields. The one faculty whose applied character was less immediately apparent— literature—served as a kind of catchall receptacle for humanities and social science subjects that did not comfortably fit into the other, more professionally oriented faculties (note, however, that political science was housed in the faculty of law.) It was also very much in keeping with the Western orientation of the Japanese university system that courses and research in literature faculties overwhelmingly involved the study of Western languages, history, and literatures, in effect mimicking the humanities or liberal arts curriculums found in Western universities at the time. By contrast, expertise and courses involving areas outside of Japan and the West were almost nonexistent. Furthermore, a highly decentralized organization of authority made it difficult to pursue research that was multidisciplinary, let alone interdisciplinary. This institutional inertia was further strengthened in top national universities by the chair or kōza system. Under this system, graduate teaching, undergraduate instruction, as well as research administration and control were all placed under the permanent supervision of units of one to three professors, who tended to jealously guard their prerogatives (Hall 1975; Ogawa 2002). The result was a system in which new initiatives were all too easily frustrated by a veto of any one unit in a consensual decision-making process. It is quite consistent with this situation that there were virtually no interdisciplinary “area centers” in Japan before World War II. To the extent the Japanese state sponsored academic “area studies” focused on non-Western cultures and societies, it did so in a small, specialized academic enclave set aside for this purpose. This was the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Tōkyō Gaikokugo Daigaku), a government-run

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language training school established in 1873 with a curriculum in English, French, German, Russian, and Chinese. Korean was added to its offerings in 1880, just as Japanese interventions on the Korean peninsula were initiated. It was not until 1911 that the curriculum was broadened with the addition of Mongolian, Thai, Malay, Hindi, and Tamil, and not until 1919 when units specifically devoted to culture, trade, and development were set up for each of the corresponding areas (Tōkyō Gaikokugo Daigaku 2008). Later, the Tokyo University Institute of Oriental Studies was established. Planning for the institute began after Japan invaded China following the outbreak of the Japan-China War in 1937, and it opened in 1941. It is difficult to ascertain to what extent the institute and its staff were involved in military planning, but its activities clearly reflected the need for a better understanding of China associated with Japan’s involvement there. Personnel were seconded from their home departments and the institute was organized into subdivisions that reproduced existing divisions at the university (i.e., philosophy, literature, history, law and politics, and economics and business) (Tokyo Daigaku Hyakunen Shi Henshū Iinkai 1986). As in the Western examples, Japanese colonial government bureaucracies and military units in Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Micronesia became sites for the production of local area knowledge, as colonial officers appropriated functions that would otherwise have been performed by native officials. Statesponsored development corporations like the Southern Manchurian Railway Corporation in northeast China also constituted sites of area knowledge production. Colonial control provided Japanese archaeologists an accessible field in which to practice their craft, albeit in ways that served the ideological needs of a state attempting to foster nationalist fervor (Pai 1999). As Mark Peattie (1988, 248) points out, in the Japanese case “thereâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›was no specialized colonial service or colonial school like those in Britain or France that might provide particular training in colonial administration.” This, however, did not mean the complete absence of institutionalized area studies training linked to Japan’s colonial project. As outlined in Lynn (1998), functional counterparts of the British and French colonial schools were created and maintained by “semi-private, semi-public organizations” that were also involved in conducting and disseminating area-specific research. The most prominent of these were the East Asia Association and the South Seas Association, both run by boards consisting of prominent government officials, politicians, and business figures. The East Asia Association, created in 1915 and whose “area” was Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, established and oversaw Takushoku Daigaku (literally, “Colonization University”) whose graduates subsequently took up positions in the colonial bureaucracies, other

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government ministries, and the private sector. The educational endeavors of the South Seas Association, whose “area” consisted of the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia, were smaller in scope and less prominent, consisting of government-subsidized area-specific training programs. It was only in 1942 that the association created a formal school—the Nanyō Gakuin located in Saigon—but this institution was dissolved along with the South Seas Association itself at the time of Japan’s defeat in 1945. In addition to the semipublic institutions, there were also a number of purely private institutions in colonial cities elsewhere that provided area-specific training to Japanese enrollees (Lynn 1998, 76–77).

Post–World War IIâ•—Area Studies The story of the emergence and dramatic expansion of “area studies” under the initiative of the American state during and immediately following World War II is well known (e.g., Cumings 2002; Wiley 2001). Spurred by the need to “know the enemy,” U.S. military and government officials rounded up the very small number of individuals with expertise on Asia and began training a cadre of experts on Japan to act as advisors during the war and as administrators during the postwar occupation. With the unfolding of the Cold War and a political-strategic purview that spanned the globe, the demand for “area experts” trained in local languages and familiar with local societies and cultures increased. By the 1960s the United States was sponsoring numerous area-specific “national resource centers” in universities across the country to serve as sites for archiving area knowledge, generating ability in various “less commonly taught languages,” and producing new area-specific knowledge. The focus of area knowledge, in turn, shifted away from philological exercises and toward the social sciences. The process produced an unprecedented number of area experts and implanted area studies as a conspicuous (if often contested) fixture of the American university landscape. The United States’ emergence as a hegemonic power in a competitive and polarized global system served as the impetus for the rise of area studies institutions and programs in that country. As a nonhegemonic small power that had consciously rejected a major strategic role in the world in favor of a focus on economic growth, Japan’s position in the post–World War II system was very different from that of the United States. The dynamics of the development of area studies in postwar Japan were, accordingly, also different. Rather than serving to expand external area expertise, the initial effect of this context was the reduction of Japanese area studies capacity. The institutional infrastructure for colonial area studies

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was dismantled in the wake of Japan’s defeat in World War II, and its relative isolation during the next two decades combined with scarce resources to reinforce the pre-existing tendency to privilege training-oriented university programs. Notwithstanding a number of important reforms implemented at the behest of the American-run military government, the disincentives for the pursuit of interdisciplinary area studies embedded in the institutional framework persisted (Itoh 2002). One significant exception to this general continuity was the creation of colleges of general education (kyōyōgakubu). The idea was to create the functional equivalent of an American university’s general education curriculum to expose students to a broad range of subjects. However, this initiative was not particularly well-received, and the new curriculum ended up segregated (often physically) from the “real” studies that students undertook after enrolling in a particular faculty during their third and fourth years. In the process, an institutional structure potentially more conducive to crossing disciplinary boundaries and, by extension, area studies, was effectively contained. Despite the panoply of disincentives, area studies was not completely absent from the postwar Japanese university setting. During the 1950s the primary conduit for this type of knowledge was research on specific areas of the world by individual academics using library sources, since there were almost no financial resources to support overseas fieldwork (Chiiki Kenkyū no Sōgōtekina Suishin Hōsaku ni kansuru Chōsa Iinkai 2000). In the 1960s, often influenced by developments in the United States, a number of areabased professional societies were created that served to relieve some of the isolation experienced by individual scholars engaged in library-based area research. During the latter half of the 1960s, some funding for overseas fieldwork began to become available as the so-called economic miracle increased Japan’s wealth. Such opportunities were typically tied to Japanese overseas aid projects that were overwhelmingly concentrated in Asia, where Japanese investment was on the rise, and were open primarily to academics from the natural sciences and engineering. By contrast, area work in the humanities and social sciences remained heavily weighted toward the study of Western Europe and North America. The Ministry of Education did support the development of a small number of “national joint use facilities” devoted to research related to area studies (see Table 1). The oldest such institute, the Institute of Oriental Studies, was, as we have noted, a product of wartime contingency. It managed to survive the occupation and was in fact expanded through the subdivision of existing divisions, as well as the addition of newly established fields like cultural anthropology and human geography. The discipline-based internal structure

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Table 1.╇ Major National Area Studies Institutes Name of Institution

Founded

Related Teaching Unit ↜Notes

Institute of Oriental Culture, Tokyo University (Tōyō Bunka Kenkyūjo)

1941

No

Began with discipline–based setup but eventually developed interdisciplinary area centers; graduate program currently being planned

Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University (Surabu Kenkyū Sentā)

1955

No

Originally part of the Faculty of Law, became an independent “interdisciplinary” unit in 1978

Institute for Developing Economies (Ajia Keizai Kenkyūjo)

1960

No

Policy-oriented focus (developmental economics); a unit of the Japan External Trade Organization since 1998

Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Ajia Afurika Gengo Bunka Kenkyūjo)

1964

Yes

Established as a “national resource center” to provide support scholars throughout Japan who are engaged in Asia– and Africa–related work; affiliated with an area studies/ language school; currently developing own theoretical/methodological approach (language–culture theory)

Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University (Tōnan Ajia Kenkyūjo)

1965

Not until 1993

Started out with a fairly heavy natural sciences leaning; now linked recently established Kyoto U area studies program

Kokuritsu Minzokuy Hakubutsukan

1974

Not until 1989

Established as a “national resource center” for anthropologists; PhD programs in regional cultural studies and comparative culture

Source:╇ Websites of respective centers.

was retained until 1959 when, perhaps influenced by the growth of area studies in the United States and elsewhere, the institute was reorganized into geographical subdivisions. The establishment of the Hokkaido University Slavic Research Center, with its focus on Russian Studies, illustrates how Japan was not completely disconnected from the political-strategic concerns shaping the development of U.S. area studies. Both the Slavic Research Center and the Kyoto University Center for Southeast Asian Studies received funding from the Ford Foundation, which actively supported the development of area studies pro-

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grams in the United States. In an interesting parallel with the U.S. experience, the Kyoto University center became the target of student and faculty protests on the grounds of its alleged contribution to the U.S. war effort in Vietnam (Kyōto Daigaku Hyakunenshi Henshū Iinkai 1995). The development of the Institute of Developing Economies (a direct translation of its Japanese title is the “Asian Economies Research Institute”) was more typical of the general tendency. Closely linked to Japanese foreign policy, which at the time emphasized commercial links with noncommunist Southeast Asia, the institute was an arm of the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry that mobilized some of Japan’s most prominent academics. At the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, a Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa was created in 1964 with a threefold mission: “(1) implementation and stimulation of research pertaining to the languages, linguistics, history, anthropology and ethnology of Asia and Africa through joint research projects and publications, (2) compilation and publication of dictionaries and grammars of Asian and African languages, [and] (3) sponsorship of intensive courses in Asian and African languages” (Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa 2006). The mission of the institute parallels the “national resource center” concept that was an important component of area studies programs in the United States. As a single center slated to bear the burden of the entire national effort, it was also symptomatic of the limited scale of the Japanese effort relative to that of the United States. Finally, the establishment of the National Museum of Ethnology marked the coming of age of Japanese cultural anthropology. The initiative created a “national resource center” for ethnographic study. The result of a forty-year effort by Japanese cultural anthropologists, the museum benefited from the upsurge in public interest in global cultures spurred by the 1970 Osaka World Exposition and was built on the fair’s grounds (Kokuritsu Minzoku Hakubutsukan 1984; Nonaka and Yoshimura 1989).

Internationalization and International Studies “International studies” has been used in the American context to refer to a field where the emphasis is more on the general processes of interaction across international boundaries than on the production and acquisition of area-specific knowledge (Lambert 2001). The rationale for international studies is grounded in the notion that Americans are parochial and require special training to meet the needs of corporations and governments operating in an ever more internationalized environment. As a result, international relations courses in political science departments and international business

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courses in business schools tend to constitute the core of the international studies curriculum. Government promotion of international studies programs began in a period when, along with the Cold War–driven globalization of U.S. strategic interests, the United States began investing heavily overseas. International studies of this sort came to the fore in Japan during the 1970s and 1980s under the rubric of kokusaika, or “internationalization,” and began to impact heavily the way knowledge about other areas was produced and consumed on university campuses. As in the United States, the Japanese government’s promotion of internationalization was a response to a perceived need to nurture individuals who could function effectively in an internationalized environment in an era when overseas trade and investment were expanding rapidly. Within the universities, this precipitated a push for an increase in “international relations” courses. It should be noted that the Japanese term for “international relations” (kokusai kankei) refers to a much broader set of international transactions than the primarily political and security-focused usage in the United States, and in this sense has a meaning closer to that of “international studies” as described above. A 1984 study conducted by the Sophia University International Relations Institute, which polled ninety-seven university departments, provides a good overview of the state of internationalization of the university curriculum at that time. As indicated in Tables 2 and 3, international relations courses were concentrated in three faculties: law, economics, and literature. The dominance of law as a venue for such courses is not surprising if we consider that in Japan political science is normally housed in law faculties. The presence of international relations courses in the economics faculties indicates the importance attached to economic relations, and the tables show the role of the literature faculties (rendered in the study as foreign language faculties) as receptacles for social science disciplines that do not fit comfortably in the law and economics curricula. The same tables indicate that the subject established a foothold in the prewar years, but that rapid growth was a postwar phenomenon. Data from the study indicates that the most conspicuous growth occurred after 1965. In fact, between that year and 1982, the number of international relations courses offered in the universities surveyed grew at an impressive average rate of thirty-five courses per year. As for the substantive content of these courses, the following points are noteworthy. First, in all the faculties one can detect a bias in favor of theoretical and issue-oriented topics. This tendency is particularly pronounced in courses offered in law faculties (53 out of 73) and in the international

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economics courses offered in economics faculties (74 out of 115). This, of course, is in keeping with the discipline-based organization of Japanese faculties at the time. Second, the strongest showing for country- and regionspecific courses is to be found among the international law courses offered in law faculties. This is perhaps inevitable given the highly nation-specific character of legal systems. Consistent with the traditional role of Japanese universities as conduits for Western knowledge, the overwhelming majority of such courses focused on Western law—for example, Anglo-American law, German law, etc. Table 4, which tabulates area studies course offerings, provides data useful for making observations about the initial impact of the internationalization drive on area studies in Japanese universities. The first is that there appears to have been little change in the regional balance of offerings from the time of first establishment to the current set of offerings. What movement there was seems to have involved the addition of areas not previously covered rather than any dramatic shift in regional priorities. A notable instance here is China, with whom relations were normalized in 1972. Although the most popular region in these course offering is Asia, if one considers that Western knowledge and examples are so tightly integrated into the regular curriculum, the figures reflect not so much a strong bias in Japanese area studies in favor of Asia, but rather recognition of Asia as an important but understudied “other” within the context of an essentially Eurocentric curriculum. Table 2.╇ When International Relations Course Were Introduced

Faculty

Prewar Period Postwar (percent of (percent of Number faculty total) Number faculty total)

No Response Number

Total (percent Number of total)

Law

8

22.9

25

71.4

2

35

36.1

Economics

4

18.2

17

77.3

1

22

22.7

Foreign Languages

2

15.4

9

69.2

2

13

13.4

General Education

0

0.0

4

80.0

1

5

5.2

Commerce

2

33.3

3

50.0

1

6

6.2

0 1 0 1 18

0.0 33.3 0.0 12.5 18.6

3 2 2 5 70

100.0 66.7 100.0 62.5 72.2

0 0 0 2 9

3 3 2 8 97

3.1 3.1 2.1 8.2 100.0

Literature Political Economy Arts and Science Other â•… Total

Source:╇ Jōchi Daigaku Kokusai Kankei Kenkyūjo 1984, 16.

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168

23 39 4 18 0 84

Basic Theory—Survey Country/Region-Specific Historical Issue- or Theory-Specific Other ╇ Subtotal

TOTAL

3 0 4 4 0 11

Basic Theory—Survey Country/Region-Specific Historical Issue- or Theory-Specific Other ╇ Subtotal

37

14 23 2 11 0 50

2 0 2 2 0 7

22 1 11 10 1 43

Source:╇ Jōchi Daigaku Kokusai Kankei Kenkyūjo 1984, 27.



37 1 18 16 1 73

Basic Theory—Survey Country/Region—Specific Historical Issue/Theory—Specific Other ╇ Subtotal

Law Number Percent

149

5 2 1 3 0 11

22 24 18 51 0 115

13 1 5 4 0 23

32

3 1 1 2 0 7

15 16 12 34 0 77

9 1 3 3 0 15

Economics Number Percent

Table 3.╇ International Relations Course Content

International Relations

International Economics

International Law

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91

11 3 1 2 0 17

10 0 3 15 0 28

20 0 10 16 0 46

20

12 3 1 2 0 19

11 0 3 16 0 31

22 0 11 18 0 51

Foreign Language Number Percent

51

3 0 0 0 0 3

3 1 0 7 0 11

9 2 4 21 1 37

11

6 0 0 0 0 6

6 2 0 14 0 22

18 4 8 41 2 73

General Education Number Percent

459

42 44 6 23 0 115

38 25 25 77 0 165

79 4 37 57 2 179

100

9 10 1 5 0 25

8 5 5 17 0 36

17 1 8 12 0 39

Total Number Percent



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Table 4.╇ Area Studies Course Offerings in Surveyed Universities Area

Asia All of Asia Northeast Asia Southeast Asia South Asia China Subtotal North America* Central and South America Soviet Union Europe Northern Europe Western Europe Eastern Europe Southern Europe Subtotal Mideast Africa Pacific Total

Area First Covered in anâ•—Area Studies Course Offering number percent**

Currentâ•—Area Studies Course Offerings (1982) number percent**

2 6 17 5 27 57

1 4 11 3 18 37

1 15 33 15 39 103

0 6 13 6 15 40

30 6 25

20 4 17

42 17 30

16 7 11

0 23 0 0 23

0 16 0 0 16

0 36 3 4 43

0 14 1 2 17

3 0 4 148

2 0 3

13 4 9 261

5 2 3

*includes one course specifically on Canada. **totals do not add to 100 percent due to rounding. Source:╇ Jōchi Daigaku Kokusai Kankei Kenkyūjo 1984, 33.

The results reported when teaching faculty members were asked about the degree of overlap between their areas of expertise and the courses they teach provides further insight. According to the responses, approximately 12 percent of the faculty members surveyed reported a mismatch between their area of expertise and the courses that they were assigned to teach. Mismatches involving area studies courses figured in two of the top three types, and taken together mismatches involving the teaching of area studies courses accounted for 40 percent of the total mismatches (Table 5). These results appear to be consistent with the general prioritization of “international relations” over area studies in the training of teaching staff at Japanese universities, and possibly an excess demand for area studies courses over the supply of area studies experts.

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Table 5.╇ Subject of Expertise versus Subject Assigned Subject of Expertise

Subject Assigned

International Relations International Law Other Area Studies International Economics Other â•… Total

Area Studies International Relations Area Studies International Relations International Relations

Number of Faculty Members

Percentage

29 25 20 10 8 26 118

25 21 17 8 7 22 100

From these statistics, it would appear that international studies was favored over area studies during the early years of the kokusaika drive in Japan. There was, however, one modality through which the Japanese state actively promoted the growth of area studies. This was its promotion of Japanese Studies by non-Japanese. The key institution in this regard was the Japan Foundation, a semigovernmental organ established in 1972 for the purpose of promoting “international exchange.” An important component of the Japan Foundation’s activities has been the support of Japanese Studies overseas through a variety of grants to foreign universities, schools, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as the provision of funds to foreign students and more senior scholars for study and fieldwork in Japan. In the United States, funding from the Japan Foundation has been critical in sustaining Japanese Studies programs set up during the Cold War era, or creating new ones. Japan, it might be noted, is not unique in this regard. Over the years the United States has promoted American Studies overseas, and one can point to counterpart programs of countries such as France and Germany. What is distinctive about the Japanese program is its scope and scale, which are considerably larger than those offered by other advanced industrialized countries (Harutoonian and Miyoshi 2002). This no doubt reflects a sense that Japan’s “unique” culture requires more promotional effort, as well as a greater reliance on nonmilitary means to promote its interests abroad. This brings us to a final aspect of Japanese internationalization, one that has received by far the greatest media play: the effort to dramatically increase the number of foreign students in Japan. In 1983 Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone announced a plan to raise the number of foreign students studying in Japanese universities to 100,000 by the start of the twenty-first century. This was considered an ambitious goal since there were only 10,000 or so foreign students in Japan at the time. The initiative paralleled—and was often compared to—the Fulbright program in the United States. Like the American

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Table 6. Statistics Relating to Incoming and Outgoing International Students Foreign Students in Japan Japanese Students Studying Abroad Number of Foreign Students in Japan on Japanese Government Scholarships Number of Japanese Students Studying Abroad on Japanese Government Scholarships Number of Foreign Students in Japan on Foreign Government Scholarships

55,000 (90% from Asia) 75,000 (80% in U.S.) 8,774 17 1,500

Source:╇ Waga kuni no ryūgakusei seido no gaiyō (2001).

program, it was widely regarded as a way to create a sympathetic element in the national elites of the sending countries. It also aimed to create an intellectual environment in those countries that was compatible with the host country’s foreign policy perspective, thus increasing Japan’s “soft power.” But unlike the United States, Japan had a university system geared more to importing knowledge from overseas, and it was only beginning to become a major producer of advanced scientific knowledge (and much of that within the corporate rather than university sector). It was also saddled with a language that was not widely spoken beyond Japan’s national borders. This was openly acknowledged by officials, and the bulk of the effort in the 100,000 foreign student plan was devoted to making study in Japan comfortable for foreign students. Measures included a dramatic increase in the number of scholarships, the expansion of Japanese language training facilities, and the building and upgrading of foreign student residences and support services. By 2002, the goal had nearly been reached, with the number of foreign students in Japan estimated to be 95,000. As a percentage of the student body in universities (1.9 percent), however, this number is dramatically less than the equivalent figure for England (16.0 percent) and the United States (6.2 percent). The growth in the number of foreign students arguably had as much to do with rapid economic growth, rising incomes, and the gap between the demand and supply of places in universities in neighboring Asian countries (92 percent of these students are from Asia) as it did with the measures adopted by the Japanese government. Nevertheless, the government was clearly committed to assisting foreign students studying in Japan, and it devoted large amounts of state resources to this end. It is thus revealing of the Japanese position on the internationalization of higher education that the state did relatively little to encourage Japanese students to study abroad. Despite this, the number of Japanese studying overseas expanded steadily (see Table 6).

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University Reform and the Emergence ofâ•—Area Studies Curriculum In the early 1990s three broad sets of changes combined to alter the status of area studies in Japanese universities. The first was an altered global environment and, within that, the changing nature of Japan’s relations with the outside world. With the end of the Cold War, conflict in the international system became increasingly regionalized and localized, even as deregulated market forces globalized the flow of goods, information, and population. This development was particularly significant for Japan, whose steady economic growth and expanded trade and investment had by then elevated its international standing to that of an “economic superpower.” Where earlier it had been possible for the country to eschew international leadership roles and passively follow the United States, by the early 1990s, under strong foreign pressure and in line with its increased prominence in the international system, Japan was forced to play an expanded international political role. The first Iraq War, in particular, was a critical turning point as Japan responded to criticism of its failure to contribute military personnel to the international coalition of forces by participating in U.N. peacekeeping operations in various hot spots around the world. At around the same time, Japanese officials began to take on prominent roles in international organizations, such as the selection of the international relations scholar Ogata Sadako to head the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, and the activities of U.N. Undersecretary General Yasushi Akashi in overseeing international mediation of conflicts in Cambodia and Yugoslavia. Finding itself newly engaged in unfamiliar parts of the world, Japanese officials began to perceive the need for the domestic production of knowledge about such areas. The second set of changes that altered the status of area studies was university reform. A gridlock of institutional forces had long blocked effective institutional adaptation to changing circumstances in the Japanese university system, despite repeated calls for reform. By the early 1990s, these pressures and contradictions had built up to a point where the logjam was broken and a dramatic restructuring of the university system began to be implemented. As pointed out by Akihiro Itoh (2002), the catchwords were now “enhancement, diversification, and individualization” of university education, and “efficiency, accountability, restructuring and reduction” in university administration. This was significant for area studies because the resulting institutional changes removed many of the rigidities of the faculty-koza system that had earlier hindered the development of interdisciplinary work. A key turning point was the amendment of the University Establishment Law in 1991

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that dramatically altered the mission and governance structures of higher education and opened the floodgates for radical institutional restructurings (Yoshida 2002; Osaki 1997; Itoh 2002; Ogawa 2002; Murasawa 2002). Although the enhancement of area studies was not a primary impetus for reform, the institutional fluidity set in motion by the reform process created an environment in which area studies could establish a more prominent profile in the Japanese university system. The third major set of changes that contributed to the alteration in the status of area studies in Japanese universities was the rethinking of the field outside of Japan. With the end of the Cold War and the globalization and localization that was everywhere to be seen, the intellectual and institutional parameters that had supported area studies in the United States and elsewhere were altered, and practitioners were confronted with the need to rethink the methods and institutional arrangements that had governed their activities. In the meantime, the steady flow of Japanese students and scholars to academic institutions in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia noted in the preceding section had by the 1990s resulted in a population of faculty members in Japanese universities who were conversant with trends in Western academia. This, in turn, created an environment in which the controversies that animated Western scholars were quickly taken up in Japan. The debate about the “crisis” of area studies was no exception. The impact of these pressures on area studies can be seen in a number of developments. One of the earliest concrete signs of government interest in promoting the study of areas appeared when the Ministry of Education funded the establishment of the Japan Center for Area Studies in 1994 as an organ of the National Museum of Ethnology. Reflecting the neoconservative spirit of the times, the new center was a decidedly lean organization with only a handful of regular staff members. To conserve resources, it adopted a network model in which the focus was on establishing links between area-oriented scholars inside and outside of Japan and across disciplinary boundaries. The center reported that between 1994 and 2000 it had linked together twenty-one research institutes, universities, and graduate schools, and that it oversaw twenty-six joint research projects involving four hundred individual researchers (Chiiki Kenkyū no Sōgōtekina Suishin Hōsaku ni kansuru Chōsa Iinkai 2000, 9). On university campuses, there was a rapid increase in the number of graduate program offerings with bona fide area studies content. According to a Science Council of Japan survey (Table 7), during the 1990s the number of universities offering graduate area studies programs and that of majors increased by more than 250 and 300 percent, respectively.

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Table 7.╇ Graduate Programs Period

Universities Creating Area Studies Graduate Programs for the First Time

Number of New Graduate Area Studies Majors Created

Pre-1970

1

1

1970-1979

3

5

1980-1989

5

6

1990-1999

23

35

Source:╇ Nihon Gakujutsu Kaigi 2000, appendix.

Table 8.╇ Research Focus According to JCAS Report (2000) Research Focus

Content

Comprehensive Dynamics

Comprehensive explanation of the politicaleconomic-social-cultural dynamics of the various areas using multiple disciplines.

Interregional Interconnections

Explanation of the basic characteristics of interregional contact and linkages in today’s globalizing world.

Issue Resolution

Identification of the fundamental facts needed to resolve the various global and local issues that confront the contemporary world.

Source:╇ Chiiki kenkyū no sōgōtekina suishin ni kansuru chōsa kenkyūsho (February 5, 2001).

As noted above, this expansion of area studies occurred at a time when area studies and area studies methodology was being rethought. Although this is still underway and it is too early to gauge exactly how it will ultimately be manifested in actual area studies organizations and research practices, recent reports reveal that this rethinking is advancing in new and distinctive directions in Japan. Table 8 presents the essential structure of the vision outlined in a report of the Research Committee on Comprehensive Approaches for the Promotion of Area Studies (see Chiiki Kenkyū no Sōgōtekina Suishin Hōsaku ni kansuru Chōsa Iinkai 2000). One of its prominent features is its applied, policy-oriented perspective. The report presents area studies as a new “scientific” methodology designed to produce local solutions to global problems. In the words of the report, what is sought is “an approach oriented to the resolution of issues based on a deep understanding of an area grounded in scientific theory.” At the center of this approach is the positing of regional

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process as the object of study. It is clearly social science in spirit, but it also envisions the incorporation of methodologies and findings from the hard sciences. In this sense, it diverges considerably from the focus on local culture that has traditionally been the object of study in Western renditions of area studies, particularly in the humanities. It is not too difficult to posit a connection between this problem-solving-oriented area studies methodology and Japan’s foreign policy agenda as a nonmilitary, aid-oriented power in the international system. Thus, in contrast to the motivation generally attributed to U.S. area studies—that of understanding one’s enemies and allies in the global strategic competition—this version of area studies is oriented to revealing the mechanics of regional processes in order to generate technical solutions to regional issues. This is not to say the approach is apolitical, but that it reflects politics of a different kind.

Conclusion Japan’s experience suggests that the structure and dynamics of the international system, a nation’s role and position in that system, and the characteristics of its institutions of higher education interact in complex ways to mold the conceptualization, generation, and dissemination of knowledge about “areas.” It is possible to detect in that experience many of the same impulses and tendencies that were present in the construction of area studies in Europe and the United States, but in a way that is congruent with Japan’s muted status in the international system. At the outset of modernization this meant an institutional environment that overwhelmingly favored disciplinebased and applied knowledge over interdisciplinary area-specific knowledge. Japan’s subordinate status in the Cold War system produced an area studies institutional structure that valued specialized research on areas over teaching about them. More recent changes in Japan’s international role as well as globalization and the end of the Cold War, along with the initiation of a radical reform process in the university system, have begun to significantly alter the status of area studies. It is too early to state definitively where things are headed, but current trends leave open the possibility that Japan may not simply reproduce extant approaches. Relatively unburdened by the accumulated weight of a wellentrenched institutional apparatus for area studies, Japan could possibly play a role in paving new “scientific” area studies methodologies. Alternatively, even if the kind of area studies that appears to be emerging in Japan proves not to represent the leading edge of a universal model, it does seem to imply

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that a distinctive new modality for area studies could very well characterize that country’s area studies in the future. And given the large role played by Japanese institutions within the East Asian region, its area studies likely will remain an important site for the production and dissemination of area knowledge about and in the Asia Pacific.

References Chiiki Kenkyū no Sōgōtekina Suishin Hōsaku ni kansuru Chōsa Iinkai. 2000. Chiiki kenkyū no sōgōtekina suishin hōsaku ni kansuru chōsa hōkoku. Osaka: Kokuritsu Minzokugaku Hakubutsukan Chiiki Keknyū Kikaku Kōryū Sentā. Cumings, Bruce. 2002. “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies During and After the Cold War.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian, 261–302. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Hall, Ivan P. 1975. “Organizational Paralysis: The Case of Todai.” In Modern Japanese Organization and Decision-making, edited by Ezra F. Vogel, 304–330. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Harootunian, Harry, and Masao Miyoshi. 2002. “Introduction: The ‘Afterlife’ of Area Studies.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.â•›D.â•›Harootunian, 1–18. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. 2006. Homepage. . Itoh Akihiro. 2002. “Higher Education Reform in Perspective: The Japanese Experience.” Higher Education 43:7–25. Kokuritsu Minzoku Hakubutsukan.1984. Kokuritsu minzoku hakubutsukan jūnen shi. Fukida, Japan: Kokuritsu Minzoku Hakubutsukan. Kyōto Daigaku Hyakunenshi Henshū Iinkai. 1995. Kyōto daigaku hyakunenshi: bukyokushi hen. 3 vols. Kyoto: Kyōto Daigaku Shuppankai. Lambert, Richard D. 2001. “Domains and Issues in International Area Studies.” In Changing Perspectives on International Education, edited by Patrick O’Meara, Howard D. Mehlinger, and Roxana Ma Newman, 30–48. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lynn, Hyun Gu. 1998. “A Comparative Study of the Tōyō Kyōkai and the Nan’yō Kyōkai.” In The Japanese Empire in East Asia and Its Postwar Legacy, edited by Harald Fuess, 65–95. Munich: Iucium-Verlag. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 1998. Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. Armonk, N.Y., and London: M.â•›E.â•›Sharpe. Murasawa Masataka. 2002. “The Future of Higher Education in Japan: Changing the Legal Status of National Universities.” Higher Education 43:141–155.

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Nonaka Ikujirō and Yoshimura Tōru, eds. 1989. Kyōiku to kenkyū no soshiki. Nihon no soshiki, vol. 12. Tokyo: Daiichi Hōki Shuppan. Ogawa Yoshikazu. 2002. “Challenging the Traditional Organization of Japanese Universities.” Higher Education 43: 85–108. Osaki Hitoshi. 1997. “The Structure of University Administration in Japan.” Higher Education 34:151–163. Pai, Hyung-il. 1999. “Japanese Archaeology and the Discovery of Prehistoric Korea.” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 1:353–382. Peattie, Mark R. 1988. “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945.” In The Cambridge History of Japan: The Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Duus and John Whitney Hall, 217–266. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tokyo Daigaku Hyakunen Shi Henshū Iinkai. 1986. Tokyo daigaku hyakunen shi. Vol. IV. Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai. Tōkyō Gaikokugo Daigaku. 2008. Web page. . Wiley, David. 2001. “Forty Years of the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays International Education Programs.” In Changing Perspectives on International Education, edited by Patrick O’Meara, Howard D. Mehlinger, and Roxana Ma Newman, 11–29. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Yamashita, Shinji. 2000. “The Japanese Encounter with the South: Japanese Tourists in Palau.” The Contemporary Pacific 12:437–463. Yoshida Aya. 2002. “The Curriculum Reforms of the 1990s: What Has Changed?” Higher Education 43:43–57.

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Chapter 5

The Development of Asia Pacific Studies A Case Study of Internationalization in Japanese Higher Education Jeremy Eades

This is primarily a practical rather than a theoretical chapter. At Ritsumei-

kan Asia Pacific University, where I currently teach, we are in the process of building up an area studies program that is not simply an add-on to an existing program or department, but the raison d’être of a whole university. In this chapter I want to discuss how this project fits in with the development of university education both in Japan and internationally, the problems of defining the Asia Pacific, and the related problems of implementing an Asia Pacific studies program at an international university in Japan. The point I want to make at the outset is that these area studies programs do not arise ex nihilo, nor can they be deduced from some body of abstract theory or empirical fact, though both logic and facts are undeniably important. It is now taken for granted that definitions of regions as objects of regional studies are socially constructed and reflect the interests of those who construct them rather than the reality on the ground. But the reality we have to deal with is that we are engaged in developing a university on the basis of these constructs and devising programs we can market, something of a process of trial and error. It is this dialectic of intellectual concerns and the state of the market that forms the context for this chapter.

Japanese Higher Education and theâ•—Asia Pacific As anyone following these matters will know, Japanese higher education has had terrible press in the past few years, being regarded as an example of Japanese closed-mindedness (Hall 1998), as part of the evil empire of Japan 92

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Inc. (Cutts 1997), or even as myth (McVeigh 2002). As McVeigh points out, this is not just Japan-bashing by outsiders; criticisms just as vehement circulate in Japanese. However, the Japanese government is not unaware of the problems and in the past few years has been attempting to do something about them (Eades 2001b). In the late 1990s it initiated a process known in Japanese as dokuritsu hōjinka, which literally means turning state universities into private foundations. Many academics are skeptical about the purposes and likely results of this change; they fear it will lead to less control but more supervision and the spread of the “audit culture” (Shore and Wright 1999, cf. Goodman 2001). It could be argued this is already happening. In 2002 the Japanese government launched its “Center of Excellence Program,” designed to reward the most international and the most innovative departments with large sums of extra cash over a period of five years. This will probably result in increasing polarization between the universities that are both international and research active and those that are not. One of the themes underpinning ministry plans is that of “internationalization,” or kokusaika in Japanese. Like the word “reform,” this is a concept nearly everyone in Japan seems to be in favor of, though there are many ideas as to how this is to be implemented (cf. McVeigh 1997; 2002; McConnell 2000; Eades 2000; 2001a; Goodman 2001). The subtext to nearly all the questions on the application forms of the Center of Excellence Program in 2002 (for which I was a committee member) was “is this research likely to be of international standard?” At the same time, the ministry has been encouraging other initiatives likely to result in greater kokusaika, including international initiatives by leading universities in the private sector. Japan is facing a rapidly falling birthrate. The number of eighteen-yearolds has been falling sharply, from more than two million in the early 1990s to less than 1.5 million in 2000, and this trend is expected to continue. Like other advanced industrial societies, Japan is approaching the limits of mass higher education, with the vast majority of children of university graduates already enrolling in university after leaving high school. This has led to a search by universities, both public and private, for new markets for their products. These include (a) getting students to stay at university longer (e.g., by converting two-year programs to four-year programs and launching postgraduate courses), (b) trying to recruit “mature students” (shakaijin) from the ranks of those that moved into work directly from high school, or pensioners looking for ways to fill their increasingly lengthy retirements, and (c) tapping the overseas market to turn Japan into a major educational hub in East Asia, in competition with institutions in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the major universities in Australia, the United States, and Europe.

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The last of these strategies is the one chosen by at least two major Japanese universities recently. Waseda University in Tokyo began its graduate program in Asia Pacific Studies in 1998, while the Ritsumeikan Trust opened an undergraduate program at Asia Pacific University (APU) in Beppu in 2000, as a collaborative venture with the Oita prefectural government (Brender 2002). Both schools were intended to be bilingual. At Waseda, where most of the staff is Japanese, courses are taught in either English or Japanese, depending on the choice of the teacher and students, and reports and theses can be written in either language. At APU, where half the students and staff are from outside Japan, students are divided into “English” and “Japanese” speakers and are given intensive instruction in the other language during their first two years. Courses are also divided into English and Japanese, and many of them are taught in both languages. The original intention was that by their third year, most students would be able to take courses in either language, though for many students this has proved difficult. The decision to establish these programs was pragmatic rather than academic, to exploit what was seen as an opportunity by these institutions and to help attract more foreign students to Japan, a longstanding objective of the Japanese Ministry of Education. In the case of APU, because the potential overseas market for Japanese higher education was seen as lying mainly in East and Southeast Asia, the Asia Pacific region was chosen as the focus, though its boundaries were left conveniently vague (Sakamoto 2001). East and Southeast Asia were obviously to be included as it was expected that most of the foreign students would come from there. How much of the rest of Asia, Oceania, and the Americas would be included was left unclear, and in effect this has been left to individual teachers to decide.

Theâ•—Asia Pacific as Regional Amoeba The concept of the “Asia Pacific” as a “region” goes back at least to a speech by the Japanese foreign minister in 1967 (Miki 1967), and interest has been growing ever since, with the number of books with both “Asia” and “Pacific” in their titles doubling every five years (Eades 2001a, 116). The list of institutions with Asia Pacific or Pacific Asia studies programs has also grown (Eades 2001a, 116–117), and there are now a substantial number of textbooks covering the politics, sociology, economics, history, and geography of the region (Eades 2001a, 117). But a glance at these books shows that the region is actually defined in many different ways, depending on geographical, national, or practical standpoints. The “Pacific Asia” of Drakakis-Smith (1992), Lo and Yeung (1996),

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and Preston (1998) refers mainly to East and Southeast Asia, though Preston does include a chapter on relations with the United States as well (1998, 154–168). Borthwick’s study of the “Pacific Century” (1992) is similarly defined. Dobbs-Higginson’s “Asia Pacific” (1993) also focuses on East and Southeast Asia, but with the addition of Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. He also includes India, as does Yip (2000). The Open University volumes provide perhaps the widest definition; here the “Asia Pacific” takes in the whole of Northeast and Southeast Asia, the countries of North, Central, and South America bordering on the Pacific, and the Pacific islands (Eccleston, Dawson, and McNamara 1998; Maidment, Goldblatt, and Mitchell 1998; Maidment and Mackerras 1998; McGrew and Brook 1998; Thompson 1998). India, however, is left out. Yahuda mentions all of these definitions in his survey of international relations, though he himself narrows his own study down to include the two superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union), China and Japan, and their neighbors in Northeast and Southeast Asia. He only includes other regions “in so far as is necessary to explain the international politics of the others” (Yahuda 1996, 7). What seems to emerge from this literature is what might be described as “core” and “extended” definitions of the region. The core definition consists basically of the countries of East and Southeast Asia, usually called “Pacific Asia.” The second, extended definition includes this core plus a variable list of other countries, usually describing the whole as the “Asia Pacific.” The Asia Pacific is therefore conceived rather like an amoeba, with its center located in Northeast and Southeast Asia and sometimes extending elsewhere, to Australasia, the Americas, and even to India. In terms of international organizations “Pacific Asia” resembles ASEAN + 4 (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus Australia, China, Japan, and Korea), while the “Asia Pacific” looks more like APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, which also includes Russia, Canada, and the United States). Indeed the difference between ASEAN and APEC is a suggestive one, given that ASEAN has pretensions to a degree of longer-term economic and even political unity along the lines of the European Union, while APEC is defined primarily in terms of economic cooperation (Aggarwal and Morrison 1998). Thus while the study of “Pacific Asia” suggests a focus on a defined region with a degree of geographical, historical, and cultural unity, the study of “the Asia Pacific” suggests a focus on the relationships not only within the region but between it and other parts of the world, particularly the United States and the other countries of the eastern Pacific. This variability in definitions is hardly surprising. Boundaries in regional studies are constantly being redefined in the light of political events or market

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considerations. In Asian studies, the use of the term “Northeast Asia” seems to be fairly recent (e.g. Akaha 1999), while even the much better established term “Southeast Asia” only became popular after the Second World War. The problem for regional and area studies in general is that the geographical, historical, cultural, and political integrity of regions is increasingly fragmented. Amoeba-like regions with boundaries that change in response to external stimuli and according to context will probably feature increasingly in regional studies programs in response to increasing globalization, cultural hybridity, and social mobility in the modern world, with the partial exception of supranational groupings such as the European Union (Close 2000). However, different definitions of regions such as the Asia Pacific have important implications for institutions that organize their activities around them.

The Resource Implications ofâ•—Asia Pacific Studies The resource implications of teaching and research in Asia Pacific studies vary considerably according to which of the various definitions is adopted. As a very rough guide, I will mention briefly figures, one drawn from an international meeting and one from library holdings. The annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association are a good indicator of the main focuses in anthropological research and area studies worldwide. In the 2002 meeting there were 108 panels focusing on a single region, made up as follows: Melanesia and New Guinea 1, Australia 2, Southeast Asia 2, Russia/ former USSR 3, Caribbean 5, Europe 6, Middle East, 6, South Asia 6, East Asia 13, Africa 15, United States and Canada 24, and Latin America 25. What is interesting about these figures is the emergence of East Asia as one of the most important fields of research after the Americas, with most of this research now concentrated on Japan and China (American Anthropology Association 2002). If Southeast Asia and Oceania (including Australia) are included, the western Pacific becomes a major area of research. And if the whole of the Pacific Rim is included, using the expanded Open University definition, Asia Pacific research appears to account for nearly three quarters of the total! The cost to a university library of trying to keep in touch with the literature on all of these areas—virtually the whole world with the exception of Western Europe, Western Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa—is potentially enormous. The second figure is the estimated extent of the current literature (in terms of books) on the Asia Pacific. Good summaries of the most important sources are provided by the Clio World Bibliography series, together with data for more recent years from online library catalogs to cover the years

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since each volume was published. Clio has attempted to provide a separate annotated bibliography for each country following a standard set of categories, though the literature on which the compilers have been able to draw obviously varies dramatically in terms of quality and quantity. For places like Macau or Brunei, it is clear that the compilers found it difficult to assemble a volume at all, and they have had to draw mainly from sources covering the region rather than the actual states. In the cases of the larger countries such as the United States, China, and Japan, there is an embarrassment of riches, and the number of citations is both much greater and more selective, typically close to two thousand. For my own volume in the series, I put together around fifteen hundred references, mainly in English, on Tokyo alone (Eades 1999). The entire database for the Asia Pacific region thus assembled currently includes over thirty-five thousand references. Within this, an idea of the approximate importance of each country can be gained quickly, once more using online library catalogs to provide a rough count. I carried out an online search in fall 2002 to find out how many books were in the library published from 2000 onwards for each country in the region (following the Open University definition). The results are presented in Table 1. Obviously countries with their own publishing industries are going to show strongly in this list, but given the size of its population, the literature on New Zealand is particularly impressive. The large number of books on Canada and Australia is also to be expected. The estimate for books on the United States is clearly too small, as many books actually about the United States published in the United States do not have “United States” in the title. But perhaps the most striking thing about the table is the strong showing of books about the East Asian countries, particularly China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Indonesia, on the other hand, is clearly underrepresented in the English language literature, with fewer titles than Hong Kong. There is less interest in the smaller countries of Latin America, apart from Mexico. The number of books on individual islands in the Pacific or small states like Brunei is also very small, in line with their populations. But clearly the number of countries and disciplines that could potentially fall within the domain of “Asia Pacific Studies” implies enormous library resources and a huge range of disciplines and topics that might be taught. The implications are even more serious if one keeps in mind that the largest amount of literature on the Asia Pacific in English is currently literature on China and Japan, countries with huge publishing industries of their own pouring out books in Japanese and Chinese. It could be argued that the Asia Pacific scholars of the future should in effect be trilingual if they want to

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Table 1. Rough Count of Books Published from 2000 to 2002 with Country Names in Titles According to the British Library Online Catalog Country



Australia Bolivia Brunei Burma/Myanmar Cambodia Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Ecuador Fiji Guatemala Honduras Hong Kong Indonesia Japan Korea Laos Malaysia Mexico Micronesia New Guinea New Zealand Nicaragua Panama Peru Philippines Russia Samoa Singapore Taiwan Thailand Tonga United States Vanuatu Vietnam

Numbers of books 2000–2002

643 44 27 79 46 854 110 1,101 113 26 69 22 41 20 192 189 1,239 233 30 139 333 6 51 470 52 18 94 95 490 8 116 139 128 2 885 6 193

Percentage (rounded)

7.7 0.5 0.3 1.0 0.5 10.3 1.3 13.3 1.3 0.3 0.8 0.3 0.5 0.2 2.3 2.3 14.9 2.8 0.4 1.7 4.0 0.1 0.6 5.7 0.6 0.2 1.1 1.1 5.9 0.1 1.4 1.7 1.5 0.02 10.7 0.1 2.3

Source:╇ COPAC, http://copac.ac.uk.

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cover the field adequately, but it also means that the Asia Pacific library of the future will also have to consider being so as well.

The Issues ofâ•—Asia Pacific Studies Given the “core” and “extended” definitions of Pacific Asia and the Asia Pacific discussed above, what are the main issues that might be studied in relation to these? The dominant paradigms in the social sciences that appear most relevant to the study of Asia and the Pacific over the past thirty years are twofold: a political economy tradition, based on world systems theories of capitalism as developed by Frank, Wallerstein, Castells, and others (for a summary see Eades forthcoming), and a cultural studies tradition informed by theories of modernity, analyzing processes of cultural change and mixing, consumption, ethnic and cultural identities, lifestyles, sexuality, leisure, and tourism. Clearly there are close links between these, with Castells making the most explicit connections in his discussion of the information society (Castells 1996, 1997, 1999) and the effects of the new information technology on both political economy and culture. In relation to both political economy and cultural theory there are different questions to be asked depending upon the two ways of defining the region.

Pacific Asia Within Pacific Asia, there is a degree of cultural unity brought about by the historic influences of the great civilizations of India, China, and Islam, which in turn gave rise to the development of writing systems and literacy. Also shared by many parts of the region are high population densities based on peasant agriculture and rice cultivation, the emergence of large states and empires, particularly in the river valleys, the division between plains-dwelling majorities and hill-dwelling minorities, and the historical development of large urban centers, with a complex division of labor and systems of social stratification. Many of the countries of the region came under European rule or influence during the colonial period, followed in some cases by a brief period of Japanese domination and then eventual decolonization after World War II. Some of them sought an alternative path to development through versions of Marxism, either under Soviet influence in the cases of Vietnam and North Korea, or Maoist influence in the cases of China and Cambodia. Even though communist regimes survive in China, Vietnam, and Laos, they have now adopted economic policies broadly similar to the other countries of the region, with only North Korea attempting to retain a Stalinist model despite internal economic collapse.

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Starting with Japan in the early postwar period, many of the countries of the region have also experienced very high economic growth, which in the case of China and parts of Southeast Asia still continues, despite the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s. Much of the literature on this growth centers around the “developmental state,” a term introduced by Johnson based on his work in Japan (1982, 1995) and much discussed since (WooCummings 1999). Alternatively, the countries that have been less successful in achieving economic takeoff, such as Myanmar, the Philippines, and Indonesia, can be discussed using other theoretical tools such as “crony capitalism,” “rent-seeking,” and so forth. Relations between dominant majorities and minorities, including differences in culture, language, religion, and access to resources are also politically significant factors, resulting in some cases in long-running insurgency movements, which are difficult to resolve in the absence of economic growth.

The Asia Pacific If we focus instead on the Asia Pacific, including the relations between the eastern and western Pacific, a slightly different set of problems comes to the fore. These include the effects of European settlement and the relations between the settlers and the indigenous peoples throughout North and South America, in addition to Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands (similar models also give insights into the aboriginal populations of Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Japan). Another is the ongoing problem of colonialism and imperialism within the “world-system,” formerly dominated by the politics of the Cold War and now by the United States. Other problems are associated with population movement, including the effects of the long-distance labor migration, which started during the colonial period or even before and led to massive diasporas of Chinese and Indians throughout the Asia Pacific and beyond; and the international trafficking of people, which has become a major source of income for organized crime and a major humanitarian problem throughout the region, particularly because of the tough line taken by the wealthier countries such as Australia. The richer countries (especially Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia) have acted as magnets due to economic growth and the fall in the birthrate among the local population, whereas China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the poorer countries of South Asia have provided many of the migrants. In particular, much of the economy of the Philippines is based on labor migration, especially by women. The problem for the migrants is that their presence in many of the countries of the region is only tolerated as long as the economic

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growth continues. During the economic slowdown in some countries in the late 1990s, followed by the acute economic crisis of 1997Â�–1998, for instance, one of the first things that happened was that the wealthier countries such as Singapore and Malaysia slammed the door on the immigrants, expelling many of them (Eades 1998). International trafficking of people includes both men (mostly as laborers) and women (especially as domestic labor and sex workers). As Castells (1999, 166–205) points out, however, this is only one part of the globalization of organized crime, with traditional groups such as the Chinese Triads, the American Mafia, and the Japanese Yakuza being joined by newcomers such as the Russian Mafiya, many of whom were former party cadres during the Soviet period. Another set of problems is associated with urbanization. As in other parts of the world, economic development has given rise to rapid urbanization in the Asia Pacific, where many of the world’s megacities (variously defined as cities with more than five, eight, or ten million people) are now located. I have argued elsewhere (Eades 2002) that as the economy develops, so the range of planning and environmental problems in these cities change. The classic megacities of South Asia and Latin America had large numbers of informal settlements, a large informal sector, and therefore severe problems in planning, service delivery, employment, poverty alleviation, and the provision of infrastructure. East Asia is, however, unusual in that the rapid rate of economic growth has allowed some of the largest cities to modernize and address many of these problems, most notably the cities in Japan where the environment has improved considerably since the 1970s. Finally, there is the impact of environmental change. Environmental change is not new, as the conversion of large parts of East Asia to intensive rice farming have been going on for centuries. But the effects of population pressure, deforestation, urbanization, and the use of fossil fuels have been made more urgent by increasing evidence of climate change, global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, water and air pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Newly discovered problems such as the “Asia Brown Cloud,” a haze that extends from Pakistan to Indonesia and covers an area the size of the United States, threaten not only climate change but a falloff in agricultural production on the order of 10 percent. Generally, the richer countries of the region are not only the major consumers of energy, but they tend to export their polluting industries and waste to the poorer countries of the region, intensifying the problems there. The twenty-first century promises to be one of increasing conflict over resources and environmental security (Nay Htun 2003).

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In the case of issues of cultural theory, it is far more difficult to separate out different sets of issues for Pacific Asia and the Asia Pacific. With the growth of global capitalism and the accelerating movements of people and information, new cultural forms spread rapidly throughout the globe, even if they do take on different forms locally in line with variations in the economic, social, and cultural context. Even though “McDonaldization” has become synonymous with globalization and karaoke has become synonymous with the technological influence of Japan, both hamburgers and recorded music can assume different cultural meanings and uses in different countries (Watson 1997; Mitsui and Hosokawa 1998). But people do not just change their consumption patterns because they think it is a good idea. There is also a huge media industry operating globally and shaping people’s tastes and consumption patterns locally (Moeran 1996; Havens 1994). New International, AOL-Time Warner, Disney, and the other major media companies control much of what people see on their television screens worldwide, and the images inevitably generate new globalized desires and aspirations. People are also forming new social relationships through their shared consumption preferences (Clammer 1997), and shorter working weeks and longer retirements are giving people the time to enjoy them. But perhaps the most visible manifestation of lifestyle and cultural change is the growth of tourism into the world’s largest industry at the start of the twenty-first century. Tourism inevitably brings with it an environmental cost, whether through the spread of hotels and resorts, the construction of golf courses, or the consumption of shrimp or raw fish. Even though it has been blamed for the disruption or loss of local cultures, it can also be argued that much of what passes for tradition has always been recently invented, that local cultures that cannot be marketed are doomed anyway, and that tourism is a major site for the creation of new cultural forms (Yamashita 2003). Tourism holds out two hopes however: as a source of income for local communities, particularly marginal communities and ethnic minorities, and as a force for the protection of local environments as the objects of ecotourism. In the idealized eco-economy, biodiversity, whether in the form of tropical rain forests, whales, or coral reefs, is worth more alive than dead, and yesterday’s hunters can become today’s game wardens if the price is right. Whether the tourist industry can ever generate enough income to lift the marginal communities that sell their heritage or environment out of marginality and poverty is a moot point, though in some instances in the wealthier countries it does seem to have happened, as in Moon’s (1989) discussion of the rise of a winter sports industry in what was previously a farming community in Japan.

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Teachingâ•—Asia Pacific Studies A focus on the Asia Pacific region, which potentially covers such a huge region and such a variety of disciplines, has opened a Pandora’s box in relation to teaching. Amoeba-like regions and open-ended disciplines raise serious questions for teaching and library resources, especially in small international universities whose composition may change rapidly in response to the vicissitudes of the regional economy. The recent impacts of the Bali bombing and the SARS epidemic on tourism in East and Southeast Asia are cases in point. Choices have to be made, and in the case of APU it was decided to divide the university into two colleges—Asia Pacific Studies and Asia Pacific Management—and to focus on tourism, the environment, and information and the media in Asia Pacific Studies. After the university opened, international development also began to loom large, and it, along with tourism and the environment, has become the basis of the Asia Pacific Studies graduate program, which opened in 2003. An MBA program was also launched at the same time. Waseda’s graduate courses cover similar ground (management and broadly defined “international relations” including the other social sciences) so that the two schools could be in direct competition—or cooperation—in the near future. The APU’s success in mounting what is, for Japan, a radical experiment has been varied. Application rates from within Japan are high, though there has been less success with marketing overseas. The main groups of foreign students are from China and Korea, with much smaller numbers from Southeast Asia, and very few from the anglophone Pacific Rim countries or Europe. The initial strategy has been to offer substantial numbers of scholarships to students from the poorer countries of the region and farther afield, but this cannot be sustained indefinitely. Another source of funding for non-Japanese students may come from government agencies such as Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as a form of overseas development aid. The size of the language teaching program is considerable, covering eight languages (Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Thai, Malay, and Vietnamese), with half the university’s full-time teaching staff involved in it. The curriculum has proved a problem as the university has tried to achieve a balance between general courses on the region and “concentration subjects,” currently the urban environment, tourism, and information media. As is usual with new institutions and degree programs in Japan, the first few years are monitored by the education ministry, and it is difficult to make changes. The result is a large number of general courses that at first glance appear difficult to distinguish from each other: these include Traditions and Societies

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of the Asia Pacific, Languages and Cultures of the Asia Pacific, Introduction to Asia Pacific Sociology, Regional Systems of the Asia Pacific, Comparative Analysis of Western and Asia Pacific Societies, Asia Pacific Networking, TransOcean Networking, and so on. Meanwhile, the lists of courses in the areas of concentration are shorter, leaving students with little real choice. Courses are only two credits, so students have to take many to graduate. Content and syllabus are largely left to individual professors, so there are problems of coherence and coordination. Students have also expressed a lack of identity with any particular discipline: the emphasis is on sociology, but many courses are actually taught by teachers from other disciplines and with their own distinctive perspectives. Seminars are also a feature of the program in all four years, and these are extremely labor-intensive. In order to manage the entire curriculum, some adjunct professors are brought in during the vacations for short intensive courses. Teachers from a variety of countries often have quite different work expectations, leading to heavy workloads for some students. It is a far cry from the situation described by McVeigh (2002, 13), in which students seldom come to class or hand in written work! In a new university, there is also the obvious problem of lack of library resources, including books and journals, online resources, and interlibrary loans. The opening of a graduate school makes the problem even more urgent. In part, the use of the Internet can make up for this, but only in part, because graduate teaching has to be based on the canon of existing standard literature and only a small proportion of this is as yet available online. Alternative materials available online raise problems of quality control. The problems are compounded in the case of a bilingual university in Japan, both by the need to acquire resources in both languages and the high costs of buying non-Japanese books within Japan. Clearly some adjustments will need to be made, and one possibility would be to extend the range of concentration subjects to include the mainstream social sciences. Another is collaboration with other institutions with complementary resources, courses, and research interests. The network society described by Castells (1996) should in theory also lead to the development of the network university. To some extent this is already happening. The past few years have seen a mushrooming of collaborations based on the availability of cheap communications and transportation, including student exchanges, joint teaching, distance delivery of courses, online research collaborations, double degree programs, and educational consortia. As the number of universities offering course content online increases, using platforms such as Web CT and Blackboard, the possibilities of collaboration of this sort increase. Real-time international contacts and interaction between students on dif-

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ferent campuses are restricted because of time-zone differences, the current high cost of good quality television links, and the lack of synchronization of academic years and semesters, but in terms of course content provision alone, there is already a lot that can be done (as can be seen from the contributions in the third section of this volume).

Otherâ•—Voices and the World System ofâ•—Academe Collaboration between institutions across national boundaries could bring one additional benefit: the possibility of listening to and bringing in other voices from the academic periphery. The Japanese anthropologist Takami Kuwayama has argued that higher education throughout the world constitutes an “academic world system,” with a center consisting of North America and, to a lesser extent, Europe, and a periphery surrounding it (Kuwayama 2001, 2004). To take the world system analogy even further, it could be argued that Japan is in the semiperiphery, out of the limelight, but capable of producing innovations and surprises from time to time. One of the surprises I experienced myself on arrival in Japan was that so much research could attract so little notice in the West. The language barrier is an obvious problem, but so are differences in the structures of the publishing industries in different countries (Eades 2000). In Japan the industry is actually so large and efficient that many Japanese scholars see little point in publishing in English, which is harder to write, takes longer to publish (if at all), and is read by fewer people than their work in Japanese. An advantage of collaborative courses across national boundaries is that they could draw on unfamiliar materials from the periphery that are published locally and are little known in the West. There are of course problems of translation involved, but at least it would make scholars aware of complementary bodies of research and data that might be worth more detailed consideration. To give one example, that of Chinese studies, there is a substantial amount of literature being published on China in Japanese, not only by Japanese scholars, but also by Chinese scholars who have settled in Japan (Eades 1996). Japanese research tends to be stronger on data collection while research in the West these days tends to be stronger on theory. The interesting question is this: In twenty years’ time, when theory has moved on, which of these studies is likely to be the most useful and interesting? In any case, what needs to be put in place are better mechanisms for making more widely available this material originally written in languages other than English. The Asia Pacific studies of the future will have to take this on board and devise better strategies for translating between academic cultures and making

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this material available, to overcome some of the barriers created by what is often perceived as Western academic hegemony. In addition to English (to say nothing of French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish), the Asia Pacific scholars of the future will routinely have to deal with Japanese, Chinese, Malay, and the other major languages of the region to make sense of the field as a whole. The Internet is clearly a major resource that can be used for this. In the twentyfirst century, an academic mode of production based on paper technology and intense competition to publish in a few prestigious journals and monographs series looks increasingly anachronistic as a means of disseminating knowledge, even if it does a useful job in grading scholars for the labor market in North America and Europe. It could be that one of the most useful things that a future network of universities might consider is setting up alternative channels of peer-reviewed publication available on the Internet, including monographs and edited volumes in addition to journals, so that materials can be made available more quickly and cheaply without necessarily sacrificing quality.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that Japanese higher education, along with the systems in other countries, is subject to the audit culture and that this is leading both to restructuring and new initiatives. In the case of Japan, the present restructuring is also driven by demographic constraints. The result is some radical innovations, perhaps the most radical being the establishment of a new university by the Ritsumeikan Trust devoted solely to the study of the Asia Pacific. But this raises problems about what the focus of Asia Pacific studies should be, both in geographical and intellectual terms. Area studies in general are undergoing changes thanks to globalization; geographical boundaries are no longer as discrete as they were, and influences from outside the region can no longer be ignored as easily as they once were. The study of East Asia and the Pacific has become popular in the last couple of decades, largely due to the economic success of many of the countries in East Asia. However, scholars differ as to which regions should be added to the East Asian core as constituting the “Asia Pacific region,” depending on their own personal perspectives and research agendas. The result is the “amoeba region,” continually taking on new shapes around a central core. The theoretical core comes from political economy and cultural theory, but with an admixture of other disciplines that are continually changing. In response to this, universities may only be able to achieve the flexibility they need to survive through forming amoeba-like networks themselves,

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with a series of partnerships built round a central core, using the Internet and related technologies. This will also require innovation in teaching methods, financial arrangements, and above all in the preparation and sharing of materials. The Asia Pacific studies of the future will have to pay more explicit attention to the mass of material being produced throughout the region in other languages, and particularly in Chinese and Japanese. The English language literature may predominate in terms of bulk and general ease of access, but in relation to any single issue it may not necessarily be the most important. Institutional support time for editing and translation will be required on a massive scale, but the Internet and transnational networks can play a major part as well. So, potentially, can multilingual institutions such as APU and the multicultural students and scholars it hopes to produce.

References Aggarwal, V.â•›K., and C.â•›E.â•›Morrison, eds. 1998. Asia-Pacific Crossroads: Regime Creation and the Future of APEC. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Akaha, T., ed. 1999. Politics and Economics in Northeast Asia: Nationalism and Regionalism in Contention. Basingstoke: Macmillan. American Anthropology Association. 2002. Program: (Un)imaginable Futures: Anthropology Faces the Next 100 Years. Annual Meeting, New Orleans, November 20–24, 2002. Arlington, Va.: American Anthropology Association. Borthwick, M. 1992. Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Pacific Asia. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. Brender, A. 2002. “A Japanese University Embraces Foreigners.” Chronicle of Higher Education 49 (5) (September 27). Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1997. The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1999. End of Millennium. Oxford: Blackwell. Clammer, J. 1997. Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Close, P. 2000. The Legacy of Supranationalism, London: Macmillan. Cutts, R. 1997. An Empire of Schools. Armonk, N.Y.: M.â•›E.â•›Sharpe. Dobbs-Higginson, M. 1993. Asia Pacific: Its Role in the New World Disorder. London: Heinemann. Drakakis-Smith, D. 1992. Pacific Asia. London: Routledge. Eades, J.â•›S. 1996. “The New Chinese Anthropology: A View from Outside.” In Perspectives on Chinese Society, edited by M.â•›Suenari, J.â•›S.â•›Eades, and C.â•›Daniel, 274–291. Canterbury: University of Kent, Center for Social Anthropology and Computing.

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———. 1998. “Asians in Motion: Historical and Comparative Perspectives.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropology Association, Philadelphia, December 5, 1998. ———. 1999. Tokyo. Oxford: Clio Press. ———. 2000. “Why Don’t They Write in English?” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 6:58–77. ———. 2001a. “New Directions in Asia Pacific Studies.” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 7:116–146. ———. 2001b. “Bureaucrats, Bright Ideas, and the Birthrate: Reform in Japanese Higher Education.” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 8:86–101. ———. 2002. “Economic Miracles and Megacities: The Japanese Model and Urbanization in East and Southeast Asia.” In Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives, edited by J.â•›Eade and C.â•›Miele, 222–243. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. Forthcoming. “Political Economy and World-System Theory.” In Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, edited by J.â•›Carrier. London: Edward Elgar. Eccleston, B., M.â•›Dawson, and D.â•›McNamara, eds. 1998. The Asia-Pacific Profile. London: Routledge for the Open University. Goodman, R. 2001. “Introduction: Higher Education Reform in East Asia.” RitsuÂ� meikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 8:1–29. Hall, I. 1998. Cartels of the Mind. New York: Norton. Havens, T. 1994. Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the Seibu-Saison Enterprises in Twentieth-Century Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Johnson, C. 1982. MITI and the Japanese Miracle. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ———. 1995. Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State. New York: W.â•›W.â•›Norton. Kuwayama, T. 2001. “‘Native’ Anthropologists: With Special Reference to Japanese Studies Inside and Outside Japan.” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 6:7–33. ———. 2004. Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Lo, F. and Y.â•›Yeung, editors. 1996. Emerging World Cities in Pacific Asia. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Maidment, R., and C.â•›Mackerras, eds. 1998. Culture and Society in the Asia-Pacific. London: Routledge for the Open University. Maidment, R., D.â•›Goldblatt, and J.â•›Mitchell, eds. 1998. Governance in the AsiaPacific. London: Routledge for the Open University. McConnell, D. 2000. Importing Diversity. Berkeley: University of California Press. McGrew, A., and C.â•›Brook, eds. 1998. Asia-Pacific in the New World Order. London: Routledge for the Open University. McVeigh, B.â•›J. 1997. Life in a Japanese Women’s College. London: Routledge.

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———. 2002. Japanese Higher Education as Myth. Armonk, N.Y.: M.â•›E.â•›Sharpe. Miki, T. 1967. An Asia-Pacific Sphere: Some Thoughts on a New Concept. [Tokyo]: Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan Reference Series, no. 4–67). Mitsui, T., and S.â•›Hosokawa, eds. 1998. Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing. London: Routledge. Moeran, B. 1996. A Japanese Advertising Agency: An Anthropology of Media and Markets. London: Curzon. Moon, O. 1989. From Paddy Field to Ski Run. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nay Htun. 2003. “Shared Interests: Regional Resource Conflict and Trans-Boundary Cooperation.” Paper presented at the Inter-University Short Executive Programme on Natural Resource Conflicts and Environmental Security. Mahidol University, Thailand, July 2003. Preston, P. 1998. Pacific Asia in the Global System. Oxford: Blackwell. Sakamoto, K. 2001. “Creating a New Style of Asia Pacific Studies.” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 7:71–78. Shore, C., and S.â•›Wright. 1999. “Audit Culture.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 5:557–574. Thompson, G., ed. 1998. Economic Dynamism in the Asia-Pacific. London: Routledge for the Open University. Watson, J., ed. 1997. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Woo-Cummings, M., ed. 1999. The Developmental State. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Yahuda, M. 1996. The International Politics of the Asia Pacific, 1945–1995. London: Routledge. Yamashita, S. 2003. Bali and Beyond: Explorations in the Anthropology of Tourism. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Yip, G. 2000. Asian Advantage: Key Strategies for Winning in the Asia-Pacific Region. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books.

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Chapter 6

For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda? Specifying Pacific Studies Teresia K. Teaiwa

What is Pacific Studies? In the scheme of area studies and interdisciplin-

ary projects, Pacific Studies scholarship is small-fry. The size of Pacific Studies professional associations as well as the rate of citations of Pacific Studies publications in wider humanities and social science indices cannot compare to area studies of more populous or more strategic regions. In relation to “Asia Pacific Studies,” Pacific Studies—even if constituted by the substantial research and literature that exists on the Pacific islands region—would figure as a puny David next to the Goliath of Asian Studies, and the results of their encounter would be decidedly unbiblical. “Asia Pacific Studies” will probably not have much of an impact on the ways that Asian Studies is conducted in the future, but the specific project out of which this volume arises provides an occasion for some introspection and re-evaluation within Pacific Studies. Whether Pacific Studies is to be articulated strategically and productively with Asian Studies or not, now is as good a time as any for students, teachers, researchers, and writers committed to the field to ask some fundamental questions about their practices and philosophies. My own experience of Pacific Studies comes from graduate study at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) and at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), from being an active member of various professional associations in and of the Pacific since 1990, and from five years of undergraduate teaching at the University of the South Pacific (USP) and six years at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW).1 I have also been privileged to participate in the Moving Cultures project through its conferences, curriculum development, 110

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and teaching innovations. This chapter has evolved out of an accumulation of informal research, reflection, writing, and conversations with students and colleagues about the purposes, ideals, and unique contributions of Pacific Studies in the context of the humanities and social sciences. At present, Pacific Studies, also known as Pacific Islands Studies, is conceived of and practiced rather loosely. The region of the Pacific itself is not consistently defined by practitioners: It can stretch as far west as Timor Leste, or it can stop at Papua New Guinea; anglophone scholars typically neglect francophone territories and literature from their investigations; Hawai‘i and New Zealand are sometimes included, and often excluded from the realm of Pacific Studies because of their status as First World societies; and a new configuration called “Pacific Islander Studies” transcends national boundaries to follow Pacific people to their farthest migrations. Much work published and presented under the rubric of Pacific Studies has a single national or ethnic focus,2 does little to extend the possibilities for comparative analysis within the region, and tends to rely on theoretical sources from outside the region as a point of reference. As for disciplinary or methodological consistency, there is none: Pacific Studies has variously manifested itself through economistic, political scientistic, environmentalist, geographical, anthropological, literary, historical, and occasionally multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. The seemingly idiosyncratic and multifarious directions across which the energies of Pacific Studies students, teachers, researchers, and writers have dissipated is reflected in the paucity of publications on the history, rationale, practices, and international relevance of Pacific Studies (see Hereniko and Wesley-Smith 2003; Diaz and Kauanui 2001; Wesley-Smith 1995; Crocombe 1987). In this chapter, I hazard a prescriptive answer to the question, “What is Pacific Studies?” My purpose is not to exclude any past or current work being done on the Pacific, but to consolidate what I see as some of the extant and latent strengths of humanities and social science work in the Pacific. Such consolidation, I believe, can help move us beyond the imperatives of institutional survival and individual careerism and clarify—both for Pacific Studies practitioners and our potential interlocutors in other area studies and/or interdisciplinary projects—why it is important that we continue to do what we do in our region(s) of the world.

Pacific Studies:╇ Before an╗Asia Pacific Studies╗Agenda Before Pacific Studies can be understood in relation to Asia or an Asia Pacific nexus, it is important to understand what Pacific Studies is. In this section I

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outline some of the geographic and conceptual contours of Pacific Studies. Our interdisciplinary field, in fact, reflects the tensions and contradictions as well as the wealth and breadth of the geographic area of our studies. The immense diversity within the Pacific islands region is demonstrated by its more than twelve hundred languages, more than seven million people (excluding the populations of Australia, Timor Leste, Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and West Papua) and fourteen independent or self-governing nations. As an umbrella term, Pacific Studies thus has space for diversity in focus and analysis; in one sense almost anything can qualify as Pacific Studies so long as it is located in the Pacific or is about Pacific people. Given the complexity of its available subject matter and the diversity of its manifestations, it is surprising that Pacific Studies has not been more consistent in generating a literature that reflects on its practice as well as its underlying theoretical or philosophical assumptions. This inconsistency may be due partly to the field’s early state of dispersion across a range of disciplines, including most prominently history and anthropology. In 1979, Kerry Howe commented on the way the region’s diversity created a condition of “monographic myopia” for the field of Pacific history—practitioners were all feverishly concentrated on their own small islands or villages or tribes, without attempting to stand back and gain wider perspectives on the process of history in the region (Howe 1979). A few years later, Greg Dening argued that it was ill-advised to speak of “Pacific history” at all, but more appropriate to think of “history in the Pacific,” so as to leave room for comparisons with histories elsewhere in the world (Dening 1989). Whether Pacific Studies would benefit from a similar reorientation—“studies in the Pacific,” not “Pacific Studies”—is debatable: What I will be arguing presently is that Pacific Studies needs to be defined by some key characteristics to distinguish it from any and all studies in or of the Pacific. If critical commentaries within the discipline of history as it has been practiced in the Pacific help us to think about the costs and benefits of narrowly focused and introspective studies, anthropology has provided fertile terrain for elaborating contestations around knowledge and academic practice. Since the academic discourse on the Pacific is still dominated by nonindigenous practitioners, one of the most vigorous debates has been on the relationship between the researchers and the researched. The most infamous of these debates has centered on professor of Hawaiian Studies and sovereignty activist Haunani-Kay Trask and two anthropologists, the late Roger Keesing and Jocelyn Linnekin.3 The critical difference between Keesing/Linnekin’s and Trask’s positions in the debate was over “the invention of tradition” or “cultural constructionism.”4 In brief, Keesing and Linnekin were keen on

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asserting the inauthenticity of certain cultural and political phenomena—like nationalist cultural revival—in the contemporary Pacific, and Trask was refuting their authority and legitimacy as arbiters of the authenticity of indigenous cultures.5 The intellectual and theoretical value of the “invention of tradition” debate revolves around questioning the stability of cultural boundaries. Analyzed and assessed thoroughly elsewhere (e.g., Turner 1997; Tobin 1994), it is necessary to note that Trask’s call for a moratorium on anthropological work being done by outsiders in Hawai‘i raised alarms for nonindigenous scholars (Trask 1991). Although the nation of Vanuatu imposed a decadelong moratorium on foreign research (Curtis 2002), and Pacific nations have to varying extents sought to regulate the work of foreign researchers—and in some cases censor the work of local researchers—in the end there has not been a groundswell of support from Pacific people for calls such as Trask’s. As earlier Pacific scholars had documented well, what is more often at stake is not who does the work, but how it is done.6 The inevitable outcomes of the “invention of tradition” debate, then, were a scathing critique of “Western” academic “imperialism,” exemplified by Vilsoni Hereniko’s oft-reprinted essay (Hereniko 2000), and the move toward indigenous or “decolonizing methodologies” (Smith 1999). As more Pacific researchers and academics emerge, a need to subvert and refashion academic space and practice has become increasingly strong in its expression. Manifestos for appropriate research design, methodology, and publication have been launched that insist on community consultation and participation at all levels and that push for relevance, applicability, and ultimately the empowerment of indigenous communities (see Smith 1999; Anae et al. 2001; Sanga and Pasikale 2002; Meyer 2001). I will return to this issue shortly, but for now I want to suggest that such blueprints for research are targeting Pacific people as the subjects and objects of research, negatively reacting to specific disciplinary theories and practices, and not necessarily imagined with programs of Pacific Studies in mind. The interdisciplinary field that is Pacific Studies grew from anthropological roots at the University of Hawai‘i and origins in political history at the Australian National University. Today, while Pacific Studies centers of research exist in far-flung places from Europe to Asia and the United States, it is only offered as a bona fide degree and/or major course of study at a handful of universities in New Zealand and Hawai‘i (see Teaiwa 2001a; Anonymous 1999; Crocombe 1987).7 In the United States of America, Pacific Studies is finding relevance through being articulated with American Studies and/ or Asian American Studies—as in programs at New York University and the University of Michigan.

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Apart from its apparent convenience as a package to be delivered by teachers to students in classrooms, Pacific Studies is just as much, if not more, a rubric for professional associations and dialogue among peers. Predictably, most of the professional associations relating to research and scholarship in the Pacific have strong disciplinary bases, among them the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO), the Pacific Arts Association (PAA), the Pacific History Association (PHA), the Pacific Islands Political Science Association (PIPSA), and the Pacific Science Congress. Predating all these is the Polynesian Society, founded in the late nineteenth century more in the mold of a “salon” and coalescing around its predominantly ethnological publication the Journal of the Polynesian Society. The existence—in some cases, persistence—of refereed journal publications provides an indication of the tenacity of scholarly life in and related to the Pacific: The Contemporary Pacific, out of the University of Hawai‘i, claims a place at the cutting edge of the field; the Journal of Pacific History, located around the Australian National University, retains a certain scholarly aura; while Pacific Studies, out of Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i, fills a middle-of-the-road role; and the Journal of Pacific Studies, out of the University of the South Pacific, struggles to achieve an international profile. Whether it is a journal publication, a professional association, or an educational and degree-awarding entity, each of these institutions has an opportunity to place its unique stamp on Pacific Studies, but not all of them have succeeded in doing so. But as long as we have this thing called Pacific Studies, institutionalized in centers and institutes around the Pacific and the world (Crocombe 1987), it is incumbent upon us—its practitioners, its objects, its subjects—to be reflexive about what it means. Terence Wesley-Smith’s 1995 article “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies” provides a useful introduction to Pacific Studies by way of distilling the most crucial issues about its composition and practice. As Wesley-Smith acknowledged, it is problematic to use the term “Pacific” as if it had a stable and concrete referent. He refers to key works and scholars who have brought into relief the arbitrary origins and malleable nature of boundaries defining the region (Wesley-Smith 1995). But is “the Pacific” that much more a colonial construct than any single modern Pacific nation? Academics keep debating whether the Pacific actually exists. Nor will it be enough to resort to semantics by extolling studies in the Pacific over Pacific Studies. As Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa has exhorted in several essays, only we can make our region real (Hau‘ofa 1994, 1997). One of the few weaknesses of Wesley-Smith’s article is that it does not tease apart the significant differences between and among regional, subre-

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gional, and national studies. Micronesian/Melanesian/Polynesian Studies and Hawaiian Studies and Maori Studies programs are included under the rubric of Pacific Islands Studies alongside actual Pacific Studies programs. As I have suggested elsewhere (Teaiwa 2001b), it is time to acknowledge that Hawaiian Studies, Maori Studies, and other such projects are more aptly described as Native or Indigenous Studies rather than Pacific Studies and that the differences between Native Studies and Pacific Studies are not just in the geographic or demographic objects of study, but in the ideological underpinnings as well. I argue here that certain ideologies more readily adhere to particular objects of study than others, and that whether we agree that it is necessary and useful or not, nationalistic ethnocentrism is more likely to emerge from Native Studies than from Pacific Studies. However, as the Wesley-Smith article inadvertently illustrated, an added complication arises when we find Native Studies masquerading as Pacific Studies, when we have ethnocentric or nationalist studies of single nations putting themselves forward as Pacific Studies. But, you may well ask, isn’t Pacific Studies simply an accumulation of national studies, whether ethnocentric and nationalist or not? Believing as I do that the object of study strongly influences the ideology underpinning the study, I have to say no. Pacific Studies by definition cannot be ethnocentric or nationalistic, and therefore must be more than simply an accumulation of national studies. Wesley-Smith’s article is organized around what he identifies as the three rationales for studying the Pacific. These are the pragmatic rationale that is common to area studies in general and grounded in foreign policy concerns; the laboratory rationale, which is neocolonial state-driven and peculiar to anthropological and historical approaches to the small island societies of the Pacific; and the empowerment rationale, which has emerged out of worldwide movements for decolonizing the academy. While it is unlikely that you’ll find only one rationale at work in any given Pacific Studies program of research or teaching, and Wesley-Smith’s main concern is with what he calls “new directions” in Pacific Studies, my concern here is with the empowerment rationale. Wesley-Smith describes how the empowerment rationale’s indigenizing agendas can take a number of forms. The three he identifies are those in which, first, indigenous scholars simply acquire competence in the tools of Western social science; second, indigenous scholars reject the values and methodology of Western social science; third, as Edward Said advocates, they embrace genuinely universal forms of scholarship for the purpose of “the reintegration of all those peoples and cultures, once confined and reduced to peripheral status, with the rest of the human race” (Said in Wesley-Smith

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1995, 125). The first and second of these indigenizing agendas seem to be circulating more widely within the Pacific academies than the third. Indigenous scholars based within traditional and established disciplines acquire competence in the tools of Western social science, while in the interdisciplinary realm of Pacific Studies—or, more accurately, in practices that claim to be Pacific Studies—we increasingly find that indigenous scholars are rejecting the values and methodology of Western social science. Toward the end of his article, Wesley-Smith proffers a description of distinguishing features of Pacific Studies research and writing: it is interdisciplinary and it accounts for indigenous ways of knowing and telling their own stories—which leads him to predict (though he is careful not to prescribe) that a postmodern approach to writing and representation will become increasingly useful to scholars in Pacific Studies (Wesley-Smith 1995, 128–129). In spite of my own track record of practicing and producing “postmodern” scholarship (a contradiction in terms, some would say, e.g., Teaiwa 2001a) and while I think there should always be space for experimental forms of representation, I am not yet prepared to endorse a single “authentic” form for Pacific Studies scholarship (and neither was Wesley-Smith, it seems). I do believe, however, that at this stage in our intellectual and academic development, and especially as we consider a serious engagement with Asian Studies, Pacific Studies needs more than mere description. Building on Wesley-Smith’s important work and bearing in mind some of the formative debates in the disciplines of history and anthropology in the Pacific, I offer this brief prescription, which I have been using to guide my development of the undergraduate and graduate teaching programs at Victoria University of Wellington. Pacific Studies shall be interdisciplinary, account for indigenous ways of knowing, and involve comparative analysis. Interdisciplinarity is necessary so that the miles and miles of stacks upon stacks of history or anthropology and other single-discipline master’s theses, PhD dissertations, and monographs of Pacific communities can be understood to feed into Pacific Studies, but cannot be considered Pacific Studies per se. Indeed, while Pacific Studies can claim to be an heir to all the content and theory of historical and anthropological studies, what the field has perhaps benefited most from is the healthy cross-pollination that has taken place between the two disciplines in the Pacific (e.g. Sahlins 1985, 1992; Dening 1988a, 1988b; Douglas 1998; Diaz 2003). What Pacific Studies has to offer the humanities and social sciences is a space for conscientious interdisciplinary engagement (Chapman 1985). Although anthropology in its striving for “emic” understandings of its cultural objects has already pioneered an accounting of indigenous ways of know-

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ing, and Pacific history has gone through progressive moves to achieve more accurate and revealing angles on its subjects (from island-centered to islandercentered historiography), Pacific Studies must also make a commitment to indigenous ways of knowing. If we do not, we replicate the academic imperialism of too many generations. But to better understand the full implications of deliberately and self-consciously developing a Pacific Studies philosophy and practice, we need to distinguish more clearly between types of indigenizing agendas, for there are at least two types of empowerment rationales— empowerment for exclusion and domination and empowerment for mutual exchange and dialogue. What is wrong with the empowerment rationale as we have seen it develop in Pacific Studies (and in much of Pacific politics) is the lack of honest indigenous analysis. What I mean by this is that indigeneity becomes a catchphrase or war cry for ownership of knowledge and resources that can block critical investigation—even by indigenous people. Nationalist and nationalist-apologist commentaries on the Fiji coups exemplify this trend (e.g. Davies 2000; Woodward 2001), as does some of the exceptionalist literature on decolonizing knowledge and indigenous methodologies (Smith 1999; Hereniko 2000; Meyer 2001). What must remain a hallmark of a Pacific Studies approach to indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing is the willingness to be critical—that is, to attempt objectivity and to try to examine issues from as many relevant perspectives as possible, however difficult that may be to achieve. Such an approach means that indigenous violence, corruption, neglect, and obfuscation shall be critiqued as rigorously as the sins of colonialism and imperialism. The final crucial element of Pacific Studies in this prescription is comparative analysis. An interdisciplinary approach accounting for indigenous ways of knowing can easily be pursued in a neatly (if arbitrarily or artificially) defined community, whether it be village-based, national, ethnic, religious, etc. But if we are not going to be “myopic” in the Pacific, to recall both Kerry Howe’s and Greg Dening’s cautions, then we cannot use the category of Pacific Studies to describe our work. Pacific Studies, to put it bluntly, cannot be about a single ethnicity, a single nation, or a single locality; to live up to the Pacific, our work must reflect a commitment to making comparisons within and across the region. The comparative approach does not have to be routine and predictable. It is certainly useful to compare the linguistic and oral traditions of Samoans and Maori, the reigns of Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i and Queen Salote of Tonga, the career tracks of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara of Fiji and Sir Tom Davis of the Cook Islands, as I make my undergraduate students do in our Pacific Studies courses at VUW. But it is just as useful to apply the anticolonial theorizing of Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau‘ofa to Niuean art and

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literature, or the feminist political economy analyses of ‘Atu Emberson-Bain and Claire Slatter to globalization processes in the Northern Marianas. There is much more to explore in relation to this or any other type of prescription for Pacific Studies. While an informal canon has emerged, there is understandable reluctance in some quarters to acknowledge it as official; curriculum and pedagogical issues are mooted and debated but await concentrated attention and critique; and coherent and consistent goals and agendas for many of the existing professional associations have yet to be articulated. After a little more than fifty years as a formal university-based program of study, Pacific Studies is at the point where we no longer need to engage in representation for the sake of it; Pacific Studies, rather, must specify the terms of its claims to representation.

Pacific Studies:╇ For anâ•—Asia Pacific Studiesâ•—Agenda Open as the Pacific region necessarily is to the flows of global theories and methodologies, Pacific Studies now also has to find the balance between attentiveness to and integrity within its own intellectual genealogies and continuing engagement with traditions and trends in the broader fields of the humanities and social sciences. Having outlined a prescription for Pacific Studies in the previous section, I move toward a consideration of Pacific Studies’ possible articulation with Asian Studies as “Asia Pacific Studies.” I begin enumerating some of the glaring discrepancies and inequalities between Asia and the Pacific that could inhibit productive engagement across their area studies. I close, however, by recalling geographer Audrey Kobayashi’s optimistic description/prescription of an “Asia Pacific” perspective. “Asia Pacific” is a highly unreflexive category that has been deconstructed more thoroughly elsewhere in this volume (see chapter 1). There are all kinds of desires and stereotypes caught up in the European/American imagination of Asia. But in an Asia-Pacific coupling, some notable hazards tend to plague the Pacific part—the Pacific becomes a vague kind of suffix to Asia, negligible in population size and only significant as space across which Asian, American, and other rim countries’ trade and power politics can be negotiated. Some radical inequalities are contained in the phrase “Asia Pacific,” for if the diversity of the Pacific region alone could be plotted on a scale from Papua New Guinea’s population of six million speaking more than eight hundred languages to Niue’s population of thirteen hundred speaking one language or Pitcairn Island’s population of forty-seven speaking two, the level of complexity and diversity within Asia is even more mind-boggling. The inherent arrogance and snobbery of size, power, and wealth leave small Pacific nations

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at the mercy of the whims of the governments of the “Asia Pacific” or Pacific Rim: China, Indonesia, Japan, the United States, Canada, etc.—who may court Pacific votes at the United Nations at the same time they resent the travesty of democracy that allows a nation of eleven thousand like Tuvalu to have a vote in the UN General Assembly equal to that of China’s two billion (Teaiwa 1998). Whether in the realm of international relations or in the American context of ethnic relations, “Asia” and “Pacific” are terms that weigh differently in significance and sit uncomfortably together in the shades of colonialism and postcoloniality. Japan’s singular historical position as the only non-European formal colonial presence in the Pacific islands has since given way to a host of neocolonial Asian trade and aid players in the region. Complex histories of colonization and nationalism within Asia then get transplanted to the United States, where they take on even more hybrid dimensions with each new migration and cross-pollination with other ethnicities. Such complexity, we understand, is part of what Asian Studies practitioners grapple with when reconsidering the nature of their field. But for “outsiders”—including those of us from Pacific Studies—the complexity that Asian Studies contains may not be apparent or may simply be incomprehensible. Many of us now working in Pacific Studies will have already studied Asia from a “development” perspective, encouraged by our governments or parents in the hopes that we would learn how to emulate the macroeconomic successes of the “tigers” and the microeconomic miracles of the Grameen Bank, or simply absorb some of the good work ethics and business acumen of “Asians.” What does Asia Pacific Studies mean when Asia is reduced to signifying wealth, albeit in a way that could salvage the Pacific from its obscurity and marginality on the global scene? Today our governments are avidly pursuing the so-called untied aid beneficence of new donors like the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, and Malaysia (Teaiwa 2002, 5–8). And when analysts are given the task of outlining a relationship between Asia and the Pacific islands, they focus on state, corporate, and cartel activities and rarely take into account those political and economic exchanges that take place in the realms of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and popular culture, for example (see Teaiwa 2001c). To reiterate, the Pacific is small-fry caught between the leviathans of Asia and the Americas; Pacific Studies is a puny David denied a biblical teleology in the face of the Goliaths of Asian and American Studies. Pacific island countries are literally positioned between centuries of Asian and Euro-American trade and exchange. Part of the problem is that because Europeans dominated the colonial administration of Pacific islands, their images of Asia and Asians

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have dominated Pacific islanders’ perceptions. Pacific people have been used to seeing Asia through the eyes of Europeans and Americans. Very rarely have Pacific islanders had the opportunity to make their own independent assessments of the Asian presence in their region. Asian Studies, and this emerging field of “Asia Pacific” Studies, have irrepressible roots in Orientalist traditions and the Cold War agendas of the United States—a heritage that, ironically, Pacific Studies also shares. Perhaps our differences are then not irreconcilable? In the Asia Pacific Viewpoint lecture of 2004, distinguished geography professor Audrey Kobayashi provided a clear articulation of an ideal “Asia Pacific” perspective. In her estimation, “Asia Pacific” offered a nonessentialized but place-specific category of analysis that contains a variety of effects of colonial histories ranging from white settler societies to Asian colonial outposts and traces a history of trans-Pacific labor migration. Kobayashi’s “Asia Pacific” demands an inclusive accounting of indigeneity, use of flexible and contingent citizenship and nation models, acknowledgment of the specificity of cultural practices and multicultural relations, and an understanding of place-specific patterns of racialization (Kobayashi 2004). Describing what an “Asia Pacific” perspective has to offer in the area of studies of transnationalism, Kobayashi’s prescription does not deal with “the Pacific” as we understand it within Pacific Studies, but her vision resonates with the description of Pacific Studies that Wesley-Smith has outlined and to which I have added. If we are to seriously bring Pacific Studies and Asian Studies into conversation, there are some crucial questions that need to be asked: What are we in Pacific Studies going to do to learn more of the ways that the concept of “Asia” itself is being contested within Asia and within Asian Studies? What are scholars in Asian Studies or even area studies going to do to learn about Pacific Studies? More importantly, how can we in Pacific Studies engage Asian Studies productively if we aren’t also questioning the depths of what it means to be producing Pacific Studies? Whether Asians and Asian Studies practitioners will ever accept us as worthy partners, the very suggestion of such a partnership gives us a valuable opportunity to take stock and sort ourselves out. Vince Diaz has talked about mutual but unequal encounters in colonial contexts (Diaz 1989). I wonder if Asian and Pacific Studies can have mutual but unequal exchanges in their postcolonial circumstances.

Acknowledgments Mahalo nui loa to Terence Wesley-Smith for all his work in Pacific Islands Studies and for inviting me to participate in the Moving Cultures project.

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My gratitude to Graeme Whimp and Katerina Teaiwa for their comments and contributions to the ideas contained in this chapter. Any shortcomings remain my own.

Notes 1.╇ In 2005 VUW also began to offer what we call “postgraduate” (i.e. graduate) degrees in Pacific Studies. 2.╇ See recent theses from the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/academic_programs_7.html. 3.╇ Note the debate in the New Zealand and Maori context. Allan Hanson (1989), Howe (2003), Liu and Hilton (2005). 4.╇ Jeffrey Tobin counterposes “cultural constructionism” with “native nationalism,” showing how cultural constructionism grew out of a critique of “old-fashioned anthropology” and how this led to a critique of native nationalism. Quoting Richard Handler, Tobin notes that what old-fashioned anthropology and native nationalism have in common is “the portrayal of social realities in terms of reified cultures, each imagined as neatly bounded and distinctive from all others.” (Tobin 1994, 112) 5.╇ This debate illustrates well that Pacific Studies is not only an academic field; it is an especially intimate field that people often enter with highly personal stakes. 6.╇ Native scholars like Malama Meleisea and Sione Latukefu have noted that being indigenous to Samoa and Tonga respectively did not make their academic investigations there any easier; sometimes, Pacific people prefer to share knowledge with an “outsider” rather than another “insider” (Latukefu 1992, Meleisea 1987). 7.╇ The Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa offers an MA in Pacific Islands Studies and has set aside for future consideration a proposal for offering a PhD. An undergraduate major in Pacific Islands Studies is available at Brigham Young University–Hawai‘i, and the University of Hawai‘i–Hilo offers an undergraduate certificate. In New Zealand, the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland, established in 1987, currently offers a BA minor, a BA major, and an MA in Pacific Studies; the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury offers an MA and PhD in Pacific Studies; the University of Otago offers a BA in Pacific Studies; and Victoria University of Wellington offers a BA in Pacific Studies, commencing a BA (Honours) and MA degree in 2005. Pacific Studies is a legislated component of the State of Hawai‘i’s K-12 curriculum (taught in seventh grade). Pacific Studies is offered as an alternative within the secondary school curriculum of New Zealand—with only very broad guidelines and no syllabi or teaching material provided for the teachers. In the Wellington region, only two high schools are currently offering Pacific Studies as an option for their Year 12 and 13 students.

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References Anae, Melani, et al. 2001. Pasifika Education Research Guidelines. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Anonymous. 1999. “Pacific Studies: Resources and Courses.” The Turnbull Library Record 32:75–93. Chapman, Murray. 1985. “Mobility and Identity in the Island Pacific.” Special issue of Pacific Viewpoint 26 (1). Crocombe, Ron. 1987. “Studying the Pacific.” In Class and Culture in the South Pacific, edited by Antony Hooper et al., 115–138. Auckland and Suva: Centre for Pacific Studies, Auckland University and Institute of Pacific Studies, the University of the South Pacific. Curtis, Tim. 2002. “Kastom as Development: Opening the Na’hai Kaljaral Senta.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 28 (3). http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/ csq/csq-article.cfm?id=1567. Davies, John. 2000. On the Sources of Inter-Ethnic Conflict in Fiji. http://maorinews .com/karere/fiji/davies.htm. Dening, Greg. 1988a. History’s Anthropology: The Death of William Gooch. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. ———. 1988b. The Bounty: An Ethnographic History. Parkville, Vic.: History Department, University of Melbourne. ———. 1989. “History in the Pacific.” The Contemporary Pacific 1 (1–2): 134–139. Diaz, Vicente M. 1989. “Restless Na(rra)tives. Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists.” In Inscriptions 5, edited by James Clifford and Vivek Dhareshwar, 165–175. Santa Cruz: Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse and Center for Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz. ———. 2003. “Re:Learning an Ocean in Motion: Reflections on Pedagogy and ‘Local’ Knowledge between the Central Carolines and the American Heartland.” Paper presented at the “Learning Oceania” Workshop, Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Diaz, Vicente M., and J.â•›Kehaulani Kauanui, eds. 2001. “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge.” Special issue of The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2). Douglas, Bronwen. 1998. Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Hanson, Allan. 1989. “The Making of the Maori: Cultural Invention and Its Logic.” American Anthropologist 91:890–902. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. 1994. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 148–161. ———. 1997. “Epilogue: Pasts to Remember.” In Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, edited by Robert Borofsky, 453–471. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Hereniko, Vilsoni. 2000. “Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism.” In Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, edited by Robert Borofsky, 78–91. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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Hereniko, Vilsoni, and Terence Wesley-Smith, eds. 2003. “Back to the Future: Decolonizing Pacific Studies.” Special issue of The Contemporary Pacific 15 (1). Howe, Kerry. 1979. “Pacific Islands History in the 1980s: New Directions or Monograph Myopia?” Pacific Studies 3 (1): 81–90. ———. 2003. “Two Worlds? (New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Culture Contact History, Encounter Studies).” New Zealand Journal of History 37 (1): 50–61. Kobayashi, Audrey. 2004. “Transnationalism from an Asia/Pacific Viewpoint: The Case of Hong Kong and ‘Return’ Migration to Canada.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint Lecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, May 6. Latukefu, Sione. 1992. “The Making of the First Tongan-born Professional Historian.” In Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations, edited by Brij V. Lal, 14–31. Canberra: The Journal of Pacific History. Liu, J.â•›H., and D.â•›J.â•›Hilton. 2005. “How the Past Weighs on the Present: Social Representations of History and their Role in Identity Politics.” British Journal of Social Psychology 44:537–556. Meleisea, Malama. 1987. “Ideology in Pacific Studies: A Personal View.” In Class and Culture in the South Pacific, edited by Antony Hooper et al., 140–152. Auckland and Suva: Centre for Pacific Studies, Auckland University and Institute of Pacific Studies, the University of the South Pacific. Meyer, Manulani Aluli. 2001. “Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology.” The Contemporary Pacific 13 (1): 124–148. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Volume 1: Historical Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanga, Kabini, and Anna Pasikale. 2002. “Research for Pacific Empowerment: Researching with Pacific Communities.” Paper presented at the Pacific Economic Symposium, Auckland, New Zealand, July 17–18. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. London: Zed Books; Dunedin: Otago University Press. Teaiwa, Teresia. 1998. “Strategic Thinking: Progressive Pedagogical Possibilities in a Pragmatic Pacific.” Keynote address at “Moving Cultures: Remaking Asia Pacific Studies Conference,” University of Hawai‘i. ———. 2001a. “Lo(o)sing the Edge. In Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge.” Special issue of The Contemporary Pacific, edited by Vicente M. Diaz and J.â•›Kehaulani Kauanui. 13 (2): 343Â�–358. ———. 2001b. “Native Worlds, Pacific Studies.” Paper presented at Atlantic Worlds, Pacific Islands Symposium, New York University, 25–27 October. ———. 2001c. “Conclusion.” In Oceania and Asia: The South Pacific Looks North. Asian Studies Institute Working Paper 18. Wellington: Asian Studies Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, 29–32. ———. 2002. “Introduction.” In Turning the Tide: The Need for a Pacific Solution to Aid Conditionality, 1–13. Suva: Greenpeace Pacific.

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Tobin, Jeffrey. 1994. “Cultural Construction and Native Nationalism: Report from the Hawaiian Front.” Boundary 2╇ 21 (1): 111–133. Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1991. “Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle.” The Contemporary Pacific 3 (1): 159Â�–177. Turner, James West. 1997. “Continuity and Constraint: Reconstructing the Concept of Tradition from a Pacific Perspective.” The Contemporary Pacific 9 (2): 345–381. Wesley-Smith, Terence. 1995. “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies.” Pacific Studies 18 (2): 115–137. Woodward, Taina. 2001. “On Being Fijian.” In Coup: Reflections on the Political Crisis in Fiji, edited by Brij V. Lal and Michael Pretes, 47–55. Canberra: Pandanus Books.

URLs for Pacific Studies Programs Cited A/P/A: Asian Pacific American Studies, New York University, USA, http://www.apa .nyu.edu/ A/PIA: Asian Pacific Islander American Studies, University of Michigan, USA, http://141.211.177.75/ac/apia/ Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i, USA, http://www.hawaii .edu/cpis/ Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Auckland, New Zealand, http://www.arts .auckland.ac.nz/departments/index.cfm?S=D_PACIFIC Pacific Studies Initiative: Pacific Syllabus and Bibliography Collection, http://www .hawaii.edu/cpis/psi/ Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, New Zealand http://www.pacs.canterbury.ac.nz/ Pacific Studies Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, http:// www.vuw.ac.nz/pacific/

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Chapter 7

Institutional Collaborations People, Politics, Policy Lily Kong

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he university is among the oldest and most durable institutions in the world, surviving more than nine hundred years. Up until relatively recently, universities were small institutions, catering to modest proportions of the general population. Educating the elite was the remit of universities. However, the reach, roles, and expectations of universities have changed, especially in the last century and a half. While universities still cater to a select group, in many societies the proportion of people with access to university education has grown. Further, whereas education was once the sole function of universities, research expectations appeared about 150 years ago, and today ever more is expected, including supporting and contributing to national economic and social development and technological advancement. This has expanded the role of universities to encompass, inter alia, the facilitation of lifelong learning through the provision of continuing education opportunities, the encouragement of and participation in entrepreneurial activities, and the engagement of university academics in multiple social and community roles. In much of the Western world, and increasingly in the Asia Pacific, universities have faced these additional expectations in a context of a knowledge explosion, budget cuts, and increasing demands for quality assurance and benchmarking. One way universities have approached these challenges is to leverage other institutions, relying on collaboration to achieve some of the goals of education and research. While there are merits to institutional collaboration, there are also myriad tensions at various levels that challenge their desirability, feasibility, and capacity for success. In this chapter I discuss some of these issues, discussing first the context, the multiple forms of institutional collaboration involving universities, government, and industry; second, the motivational forces and success factors in institutional collaboration; and third, 125

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the specific experience of interuniversity collaborative teaching involving the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and the National University of Singapore, from which broader values and policies can be observed. I end sounding a note of cautious optimism for the various forms of institutional relationships.

The Multiple Forms of Institutional Collaboration Institutional collaboration involving universities includes intersections between universities and government agencies and between universities and private industry. What I would like to elaborate on here are three types of institutional collaborations, with a particular focus on collaboration in teaching and then, where appropriate, on the humanities and social sciences. The three areas of collaboration are interuniversity collaborations, universitygovernment collaborations, and university-industry collaborations.

Interuniversity Collaborations Some examples of interuniversity educational collaborations include student exchange, study abroad, and overseas summer programs; field-based classes in overseas destinations; joint/double degree programs or long-distance collaborative teaching; and involvement in international university networks. Of course, interuniversity collaborations also extend to faculty exchanges and research partnerships, but in this discussion I will confine the focus to education. Student exchange, study abroad, and overseas summer programs have become a way of offering students an opportunity to live and study overseas for a semester or a year. The stint allows students to experience a different and more independent way of life, with the benefits of interacting with divergent academic and professional expertise. Examples of such programs abound. For example, formalized multiple-university groups such as the Group of Ten Student Exchange Program, for Canadian universities1; Erasmus (European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students), the European Commission’s educational program for higher education students, teachers, and institutions2; and University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific, a voluntary association whose aim is to enhance international understanding through increased mobility of staff and students. These are in addition to more ad hoc bilateral arrangements between institutions, often negotiated on a renewable, small-scale, short- to medium-term basis. Related to such student exchange programs are overseas summer programs, which appear to be gaining popularity, at least among academic administrators in North American universities seeking overseas experience for their students. These

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entail bringing a summer class to a foreign destination, often based at a local university, with lectures and discussions conducted by an accompanying faculty member and one or more local faculty members, and traveling to various places in the foreign destination and its vicinity. A similar concept my institution has developed is a field-based module which involves a class in some part of Southeast Asia, with assistance from a local university in the field destination and interaction with faculty members and students there, centered around a field project. The class lasts four to six weeks, and the experience has proven intensive and rewarding for faculty members and students alike. Joint/double degree programs often have similar goals as student exchange and study abroad programs, but frequently in a more intensive way. Usually, two universities will join hands to offer one or sometimes two degrees to a student who spends a specified time in each of the two institutions. My own institution, for example, boasts a number of such arrangements, including for example a double degree in engineering from NUS and the French Grandes Ecoles, and joint degree programs for a master’s and a PhD in chemical engineering awarded by NUS and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Such arrangements are the outcome of careful negotiations, especially when institutions differ on myriad counts: graduation requirements, fee structures, length of candidature, semester dates, student culture, and many more. Nevertheless, the prestige and value of being a graduate of two universities can enhance a student’s employability, while exposing him or her to many of the benefits a student on exchange enjoys. Interuniversity collaboration also extends to collaborative long-distance learning ventures. The Ford Foundation–funded Moving Cultures project, incorporating the Remaking Asia Pacific Studies program (see the chapters in part three), offers one example of collaborative teaching and learning, using interactive pedagogies and involving student-centered Asia Pacific learning communities created at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) in collaboration with partner campuses in Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Fiji, and New Zealand. Another example of collaborative teaching is two Australian universities’ cooperative effort to ensure that Asian language courses will still be offered effectively in the midst of concerns about lower enrollments and high costs. Australian National University and the University of Sydney collaborated in the teaching of Hindi and Sanskrit from 1998, with the lecturers traveling between the two campuses and an in situ tutor appointed on each campus as a local point of contact for students. In 1999, video conferencing facilities were introduced with the launch of the Small Enrolment Asian Languages Project (SEAL), replacing some of the campus visits by the lecturers. SEAL was

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aimed at preserving student choice by facilitating cooperation in the delivery of lower enrollment Asian language courses by Australian universities, using technology to enhance language teaching exchanges, and promoting the study of small enrollment languages (ANU Reporter 2000). Institutional collaboration, enhanced by technology, made it more cost-effective to sustain the program, thus preserving student choice. Institutional collaboration is also reflected in international networks such as the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) and Universitas 21. The APRU was founded in 1997 and “seeks to promote scientific, educational, and cultural collaboration and advancement among its member universities” hailing from sixteen economies bordering the Pacific Ocean (APRU 2008). It provides a forum to stimulate cooperation in teaching and research on issues of major importance to the Pacific Rim community. Universitas 21, in turn, is an international network of seventeen research-intensive universities in ten countries. Like APRU, it is a framework for international collaboration, designed to allow member universities to “pursue significant global initiatives that would be beyond their individual capabilities” (Universitas 21 2006). One of the educational initiatives of Universitas 21 is an online collaborative Master of Business Administration program involving sixteen universities and spearheaded by Singapore.

University-Government Collaborations The work done by university academics, particularly that within the humanities and social sciences, can and does contribute to an understanding of societal issues, including economic and political ones. This means that government institutions have an interest in collaborating with faculty members to contribute to an understanding of issues as wide-ranging as fiscal policy to heritage conservation and bioethics. Such collaboration takes place in a number of ways. Much of faculty members’ time is spent sitting on government committees, contributing to discussions and debates about specific issues in which they have domain expertise. This is part of the “service to community” that is so often expected of colleagues, perhaps especially in the humanities and social sciences. In one randomly selected academic year at the National University of Singapore (2000–2001), for example, approximately 170 government committees or projects were involved with the approximately 400 members of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). The nature and impact of such participation is also wide-ranging, from relatively token representation on some committees to analysis of significant problems and membership on committees that make recommendations to Parliament. In the latter two roles, university academics

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are frequently called upon to conduct substantial studies in areas of interest and concern to the government. More often than not, this is on a “voluntary” basis, although paid consultancies also occur. Commonly, too, the terms of reference for the research are subject to significant shaping by the government.

University-Industry Collaborations Most university-industry collaborations lend themselves best to the scientific arenas. Examples drawn from the context of my own university will illustrate this. As part of a drive toward cultivating an entrepreneurial culture, the National University of Singapore initiated the establishment of NUS College in Silicon Valley (NCSV) in July 2001 and NUS College in Bio Valley (NCBV) in July 2002. The viability of these overseas colleges is contingent on university-industry collaboration. At NCSV, participating students serve as interns with technology-based start-ups in Silicon Valley for one year and attend entrepreneurship and discipline-based courses at Stanford University. At NCBV, participating students intern with biomedical and biotech startups at Bio Valley in central Philadelphia, surrounded by the comprehensive scientific and industrial development of the Delaware Valley. Outside these overseas initiatives in the sciences, student-centered university-industry collaboration within the humanities and social sciences also takes the form of internship opportunities for students in media, journalism, banking, urban planning, and other contexts. University-industry collaborations that are faculty-centered focus on research collaborations. Here again, the terms of reference for the research are subject to significant input and shaping by industry. For the humanities and social sciences, areas that attract industry collaboration include consumer psychology for market researchers, historical research for heritage brokers, and risk analysis reports for investor companies.

Institutional Collaboration:╇ Motivational Forces, Success Factors While there are many opportunities for institutional collaboration—between and among universities, between universities and government institutions, and between universities and industries—not all collaborations yield successful results. I would like to focus on the impetuses and critical success factors for such ventures addressing the title of this chapter: people, politics, and policy. In brief, I suggest that institutional collaboration occurs and often succeeds because of individual personalities who believe in and work to realize such alliances (“people”); because universities existing in a particular financial,

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ideological, and political milieu find it politically expedient to flag institutional collaboration as an indicator of their progressive stance (“politics”); and because there is institutional will, relevant support, and clear incentives or rewards (expressed via clear and consistent “policy”). Committed individuals, supportive politics, and consistent policy are thus important conditions for institutional collaboration to succeed. I shall organize my discussion below by focusing on specific tensions.

People Institutional collaboration requires individual champions. Individuals may be responsible for sowing the seeds of ideas; they may flesh out important details that presidents and vice chancellors of universities have given little thought to when they agree to collaborate; and they invariably bear the burden of comprehending and adjusting to other institutional cultures. The two sets of tensions that individuals confront are thus apparent both within an institution and across institutions. The first set of tensions occurs when a particular collaborative venture is the outcome of agreement at high levels in a university administration, but the enthusiasm is not felt among faculty members and/or students. This could be the result of a lack of understanding of the strategic intentions of upper levels of university management or a reverse lack of understanding of what is possible on the ground. The internal tensions may make for difficult and resentful implementation. The second set of tensions occurs when individuals have to negotiate different institutional cultures that are built on visible but also “subterranean norms and values” (Moran and Mugridge 1993, 152) in respective institutions. This is evident in collaborative teaching programs where, for example, individuals have to work through different assumptions about curriculum and pedagogy, such as what sorts of knowledge should be taught at what levels and what kinds of pedagogy are to be adopted, taking into account dissimilar student backgrounds, student cultures, and expectations of teaching and learning practices. Often, these tensions can be diminished when there are successful personal relationships. As Moran and Mugridge (1993, 154) point out, sustained relationships based on personal trust and shared values cannot be overestimated as factors in successful collaboration. The presence of one or more champions in each institution, willing to listen to and trust their counterparts, is a near-universal feature of collaborative ventures.

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For these reasons, it helps a great deal when collaboration arises out of personal friendships across institutions, and like-minded individuals enter into collaborative ventures that bear the label of “institutional collaboration.” Even so, a great deal of communication and a mutual willingness to compromise and take on each other’s ideas is necessary to keep both the friendship and the collaboration going! Yet perhaps it is fair to claim ultimate success from an institutional perspective only when relevant collaborative programs continue even after the original champions have stopped driving the initiative and others have come on board. As Moran and Mugridge (1993, 152) point out, this underscores the “importance of embedding [the] cultural knowledge in the values and practices of the partnership itself, so that it no longer depends entirely or even primarily on particular individuals.” In practical terms, interpersonal trust and understanding (perhaps even inchoate intuitions) will need to be turned into explicit systems and specified ways of operating. Clarity about what resources are to be shared and what resources are expected from each partner will prevent a souring of relationships. Similarly, clarity of respective roles will be helpful. All this can help to regulate “expected behavior” from collaborating partners, which is crucial if relationships are to continue with perceived fairness and trust on all sides.

Politics Apart from issues surrounding individuals and their institutions, institutional collaboration is also rendered (im)possible by various politics that institutions find themselves entangled in. This is best illustrated by reference to the politics of specific circumstances. In an earlier commentary (Kong 1999), I wrote about the main issues that occupy the gatekeepers, managers, and administrators of Singapore’s higher education. I argued that this was best summarized as a persistent concern to situate Singapore as an important center of education and research in the world and an indefatigable reluctance to sit in the “peripheries.” This vision has been operationalized in a variety of ways. For example, bringing top universities from other parts of the world to Singapore (e.g., Insead, Chicago Business School, Wharton Business School, Duke Medical School); developing joint and/or double degrees between local and overseas universities; and chasing student exchange opportunities with overseas universities of good standing. More and more, in recent years there has been a marked tendency to look to North American and especially U.S. institutions for partnerships. Because of its colonial links with Britain and the premium given to OxbridgeLondon education, Singapore has increasingly looked toward privileging an

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American educational connection. Singapore’s leaders and senior university management have variously highlighted Harvard, Stanford, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as universities to aspire toward, with slogans such as “Boston of the East” and “being to Singapore what Stanford is to Silicon Valley” to signal the direction envisioned. The National University of Singapore sought out U.S. partners in the establishment of its first two overseas colleges, one located in Silicon Valley, collaborating with Stanford, and the second in Bio Valley, collaborating with the University of Pennsylvania. For Singapore’s leadership this represents the hegemony of the American university system. Without getting into a discussion about the sagacity of such a move, I would like to address some of the tensions that result from such situations, tensions that have much to do with the hegemony of America and American politics projected onto interuniversity collaboration. One example of asymmetrical relations is a recent enthusiasm among many American universities for overseas summer schools, particularly in Asia (at least before the 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali). Each program involves groups of twenty-five to thirty-five students coming to NUS to take courses during the North American summer, preferably with other local students, as well as to participate in educational trips in the region. NUS is a preferred base and launchpad into the region. Educationally, the initiatives are welcome as a way of opening the eyes of American students to Asia. Negotiations for NUS students to study in American universities, however, become embroiled in local and national American politics. One issue that needs to be worked around, for example, is the number of Singaporean students that can be accommodated in the return exchange, and this involves two related concerns in American politics and policy. The first is what proportion of out-of-state students is acceptable in each American (state) university, and the second, related, issue is what is deemed acceptable as a level of effective subsidies (through tuition waivers) for overseas students on exchange programs. Issues of spending American tax dollars for non-U.S. citizens are often potential obstacles to successful institutional collaboration because of asymmetrical outcomes and benefits. Sufficient studies have shown that American students have little conception and knowledge of the world, perhaps especially Asia and Africa, while Europe and Australia hold their interest and fascination. This is translated into a reluctance to travel to lesser-known places. The converse is true of students in Asia, or at least Singapore where I have firsthand empirical knowledge. Students there seek to go to North American universities while displaying little interest in a stint at a regional university. In student exchanges, imbal-

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ances arise as many more students from Singapore seek to go to American institutions than Americans who choose to come to Singapore. The hegemonic presence of “America” in Singaporean student imagination and the converse absence and/or Orientalist imagination of Asia in American student consciousness renders sustained institutional collaboration in the form of student exchange/study abroad programs problematic. Political considerations also factor into university-government collaborations. University leadership is often well aware that societal support is tied to a perception of its relevance in society’s problem-solving efforts. The university often has the expertise to contribute ideas and solutions in response to society’s needs. Indeed, if new knowledge is to produce the greatest social value, research on R&D demonstrates that it must be moved into use as rapidly as possible. This normally requires some institutional interconnection between the research process and society (Bonnen 1998). It is therefore not surprising that government institutions call on universities to share their expertise. Universities that do not respond to such calls without convincing reasons will find direct or indirect withdrawal of societal support. Indeed, it may lead to the creation of even more substitutes for the university (Bonnen 1998). Tensions in university-government collaboration therefore confront academics who on the one hand are exhorted to seek global recognition through their international publications, and on the other hand are required to respond to local societal needs and requests from government institutions for expertise. While these are not mutually exclusive, it is true that the most effective local policy contributions may not find their way into the best and most prestigious academic journals. For example, local economic policy work may not be publishable in the gold standard of academic economics journals, such as the American Economic Review. The viability of such collaborations is therefore hampered at times by divergences in orientation and intent.

Policy University policies can play an important role in contributing to the success of collaborative efforts. But they can also work at cross-purposes. It is not uncommon to have university policies that are individually consistent but that conflict with the policies of other universities. One example in interuniversity collaboration is when universities exhort faculty members to engage in innovative collaborative teaching across institutions, while establishing

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elaborate structures and systems for evaluation of faculty in research. The potentially conflicting signals about the relative importance of research and teaching shape the aspirations and attitudes of faculty members and influence the likely success of projects. Not least, they influence decisions about the allocation of financial and time resources at both the institutional and personal levels. Another tension is between university policy to enter into collaboration for financial reasons (anticipated cost savings) and the reality of resource needs in collaborative ventures. Indeed, Moran and Mugridge (1993) make the case that practical financial considerations rather than intellectual ones often drive institutional (interuniversity) collaborations. Thus, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as “rationalization,” “accountability,” and “cost efficiency” become key operative principles, collaboration is adopted primarily as an economic strategy. On the other hand, it is sometimes a fallacy or an overgeneralization to claim that institutional collaboration leads to cost savings for the universities involved. In some instances, the reverse may be true as resources have to be invested to make the collaboration work. For example, student exchange programs require that resources be found (either by the students themselves, by their institutions, or some combination of the two) for overseas expenses. Similarly, long-distance collaborative teaching sometimes entails financial investments, not least because such teaching relies on communications and information technologies that have to be put in place or synchronized. Entering into collaboration on the mistaken assumption that there will be cost savings when in fact additional resources are needed means that a collaborative project is severely handicapped from the start. Apart from university policies and the tensions surrounding them, government policies can also affect decisions on whether to become involved in university-government collaboration. Government policies, for example those restricting the freedom with which data can be released in the public arena, may influence the willingness of academics to collaborate. When data collected from university-government collaborations do not receive publication release permission, academics find themselves unable to respond to the pressures to publish academically in the “international” arena. Given the limited time each individual can devote to work life, individuals must choose between collaborating in government projects, thus possibly influencing policy and contributing to the management of societal problems, or to use other data sources and be allowed to publish internationally. Though they are not always mutually exclusive, they often are. When too many overtures by government institutions to collaborate do not attract academics, it has the

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unfortunate effect of diminishing the relevance of the university in the eyes of government.

Interuniversity Collaboration in Educational Initiatives Having broadly elaborated on interinstitutional collaborations, I would like to return to focus on the main interest of this volume, interuniversity educational initiatives. This focus on pedagogies is refreshing. It is my experience that faculty members often tend to be much more focused on research collaboration than on teaching collaboration across institutions. The former is a well-established and well-acknowledged activity, with known value and recognized outcomes in copublication. However, the outcomes of coteaching are less tangible, and the value that institutions place on such efforts are perhaps less easily gauged and less immediately apparent. Giving explicit space to a discussion of collaborative teaching confers on it the attention it deserves. Collaborative teaching across institutions is potentially fraught with difficulties but, if thoughtfully done, has much to commend it. To my mind, student exchange opportunities would be one of the best experiences for students who wish to broaden their horizons, to be exposed to different teaching and learning cultures, and to engage with students in different social-cultural contexts. However, given that some of the opportunities are more circumscribed than desired because of the difficulties outlined above, long-distance collaborative teaching, such as that of the Ford Foundation Moving Cultures project, offers a valuable alternative experience. While it does not approximate a student exchange experience, it is nevertheless a step in the direction of exposing students to different perspectives, cultures, and experiences. The collaboration relies on communications via cyberspace among students and faculty members, and although I do not believe cyberspace communication can replace the depth of understanding that can be developed via face-to-face interaction, I recognize that it facilitates communication that might otherwise not have taken place at all. Further, it may be that for some, such faceless communication actually encourages more candid exchanges than face-to-face communication. Thus, long-distance collaborative teaching in cyberspace, purely by virtue of the mode of communication, has both merits and drawbacks. At the same time, it is important to recognize that not all face-to-face interactions are equally enlightening or productive. Not least, power relations shape the nature and quality of interactions. Given some of the above considerations, when then UHM dean Willa Tanabe and her colleagues visited NUS to propose that our two institutions

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participate in the Ford Foundation–funded collaborative teaching endeavor, I was keen to seize the opportunity. I saw it as a valuable means by which our students could benefit from cross-cultural communication with other students and from the experience of a different teaching and learning style than in Singapore (most students at NUS are local students who have received all their schooling in Singapore’s education system). I knew some of the faculty members at UHM who would be participating in the experiment through my own research network. I respected their work and thought that, for our students, it would be the next best thing to having the faculty members visit NUS to teach. For NUS’s faculty members, I was motivated by the fact that they stood to benefit in at least two ways: in engaging with different pedagogical innovations, enhancing their teaching portfolios and experience, and in working with some original researchers with whom they might strike up research partnerships if the teaching collaboration developed spillover effects. For NUS as an institution, it seemed to be a valuable opportunity to showcase some excellent and committed teachers, and perhaps the collaboration might cause some bright undergraduates at UHM seeking graduate school prospects, particularly in Asian Studies, to consider NUS as a real option, which might not have occurred without the prior exposure. In this and other collaborative teaching initiatives, faculty members will invariably weigh the time requirements of such a venture with that demanded from research and other university commitments. Until several years ago, NUS was essentially an undergraduate teaching institution, but in the past few years it has emphasized a vision of becoming a research-intensive university without sacrificing the quality of undergraduate teaching. The familiar and dreadful multiple calls on one’s time are very real and sufficiently demanding even with ordinary teaching arrangements, but with collaborative teaching that requires ever more coordination and adaptation, faculty members would have to be prepared for the additional time commitments. To the credit of those involved, they undertook the challenge with enthusiasm. The factors that contributed to the successful completion of the collaborative teaching venture but also to the difficulties along the way may be analyzed using the earlier framework of “people,” “politics,” and “policy.” Elsewhere in this volume, more detailed analysis of the relative success of this collaborative venture is provided by those directly involved. Nevertheless, from an administrative observer’s perspective, a key factor that made the collaboration proceed smoothly was the primary actors. People made the difference. The individuals involved were committed educators who had an interest in pedagogical issues and had a track record as excellent and dedicated teachers. Thus, although the collaboration was initiated at a meeting between

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two deans, the hard work of making it happen was done by faculty members who believed in the value of what they were doing as opposed to merely responding to an initiative imposed from above. There was also strong support at the departmental level for the individuals to engage in the enterprise. Given the commitment to the cause, an obvious question is why it has not continued after only a year. In this case, the peculiarities of the situation must be understood. With two of the four faculty members involved in the initiative on sabbatical leave the year after the collaborative teaching semester, the individuals involved decided to temporarily halt the collaborative teaching venture while keeping the option open of reviving it later. That the collaboration is suspended because of “absent” members is evidence that the relationship has not yet been institutionalized but relies instead on the interpersonal understanding developed between the key actors. In many ways, this is only to be expected, given that the collaboration had lasted only a year, with each faculty member involved in the teaching of one module. But from an institutional perspective, for all the investment of time that has already occurred and after the valuable lessons derived from the first experience, it would be a shame if there were not one or two more rounds of collaborative teaching between the two institutions. The ultimate evidence of success would be the ability of each of the two institutions to take this experience of collaborative teaching and learning to different partners and be able to take the lead in organizing other such ventures. In other words, the knowledge and experience of individual participants could be coded in such a way that the experience could be passed on to different people and different institutions. While the successes were built on the commitment of individuals, the difficulties of the venture also revolved around people, particularly the different student cultures. Both sets of students reported that the hard-working NUS student and the more relaxed UHM students caused anxieties among the former when assignments were due and work did not seem nearly done. That the participants from both institutions were from different years of study also suggested that the playing field was not as level as it could have been, and exchanges did not always proceed with similar levels of intellectual engagement. Institutionally, the encouragement to participate in teaching innovations and pedagogical inventiveness, including collaborative long-distance teaching, is structurally embedded in university policy. From a long-term perspective, promotion and tenure prospects are enhanced for those who engage in such activities. Those who have taught well in the classroom are favored, but those who have successfully engaged in innovative pedagogies, produced teaching material such as courseware or textbooks, and contributed to curriculum

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development are deemed a cut above. From a shorter-term perspective, the unique NUS strategy of offering individual and group performance bonuses for meritorious performance in teaching, research, and service in any one year may act as an incentive. Individual performance bonus is, as the term suggests, a monetary reward for meritorious performance by an individual in teaching, research, and/or service for the year under review. Group performance bonus is department-based, and the collective performance of a department in teaching, research, and service, and in hiring and retention, determine the end-of-year bounty, which each individual in the department shares. Further, in the yearly university awards lauding outstanding teachers, innovative and developmental contributions to teaching and curriculum help to tell apart the many faculty members who do well in the classroom. For the faculty members and students involved in the experiment between UHM and NUS, several rewards—educational, personal, and financial—have since served them well. These may well function as incentives to others who might take up a future challenge of interuniversity collaborative teaching, of which there is current interest (as part of the Universitas 21 framework mentioned above). At an intangible but important level, the collaborative venture has helped to forge friendships among students, and mutual visits to Hawai‘i and Singapore have ensued for a few. A faculty member from Singapore on the collaborative teaching team has also now spent sabbatical time at UHM. The financial rewards for individuals and groups described above have also since come to pass. Certainly, the evaluation of teaching in the Department of Geography at NUS has benefited, in part, as a consequence of the efforts to collaborate with UHM. This is explicit university recognition of the value of such endeavors. Beyond the long-distance collaboration in teaching, such efforts may be evaluated as reaching a higher, more sustained level of success if they represent the beginning of more enduring collaborations and relationships. In the short term, this would take the form of a student exchange program where select students who have participated in the long-distance collaborative learning take cross-cultural learning to the destination they have begun to learn about. Indeed, agreements have now been signed between UHM and NUS, and a student exchange program memorandum of understanding is in force. For now, different students from those engaged in the collaborative teaching-learning endeavor are involved in the student exchange, though it is possible to envisage how future selections could privilege those who already have had the initial interaction with the counterpart institution. Other forms of innovative collaborative teaching between the two institutions might also be considered, building on the understandings and insights gained in the first

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experiment. For example, field-based classes that draw on the expertise and collaborative experience of faculty members could be developed, focused on selected themes such as tourism sites, migration and diaspora, ethnic enclaves, and so forth. Classes would be held in at least both destinations and possibly in other selected sites that exemplify the particular theme in question, with heavy emphasis on field research. For this to be possible, sponsorship will be necessary to help fund expenditures, at least for the students, assuming universities fund the initiative for faculty members. In the longer term, enhanced relationships could meaningfully take the form of students’ continued engagement with each destination, perhaps through seeking graduate or employment opportunities at the respective destinations. This assumes that the collaborative effort yielded positive experiences for at least some students who would wish to pursue the connection. However, the experience of the Moving Cultures teaching collaboration suggests that a certain degree of cultural politics militated against a wholly positive initial experience for some students (see chapter 9). This was at least embroiled in the students’ own personal ethnic identities and national pride and the negotiation of multiple stereotypes about the other. The experience of the UHM-NUS collaboration embraced several valued activities for NUS and can serve as a useful signal to faculty members of the enthusiasm of the university for innovative teaching, international collaboration, and student exchange. Building on these interactions, the two institutions now face opportunities for further collaboration, both in teaching and research.

Concluding Comments From a larger perspective, institutional collaboration—between universities, with government, and with industry—is a positive activity if we focus on how it can enhance students’ learning experience, facilitate “downstream” research with real potential for application in policy and industry, and leverage the strengths of respective institutions in times of increasing demands on the university. As universities seek to position themselves nationally and internationally, intellectually, politically, and financially, the strategy of institutional collaboration can be attractive. But the success of institutional collaboration relies on a range of factors, revolving critically around people, politics, and policy. The alignment of motivating and supportive conditions cannot be assumed, and indeed, countervailing forces that prompt institutional distinctiveness and independent identity cannot be underestimated. Such forces ensure that collaboration does not undermine the singularity

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of institutional identities, amidst calls for greater national and international institutional collaboration. In interuniversity educational collaborations, a variety of experiences around the world indicate that this may well be a growing trend as the world globalizes. A few such experiences have been explicated or cited above. Like the UHM-NUS collaborative teaching project, each requires that university policy and circumstances are supportive, that there are committed individuals willing to work to make it succeed, and that national, local, and personal politics offer salubrious conditions for the collaboration to succeed.

Notes A modified version of this chapter is published as “People, Politics, Policy: The (Im)Possibilities of Institutional Collaboration” (2003) Environment and Planning A, Vol. 35: 1143–1150. 1.╇ The ten universities are McGill, McMaster, Queen’s, Laval, Montreal, Alberta, British Columbia, Toronto, Waterloo, and Western Ontario. 2.╇ Erasmus is open to thirty countries: the fifteen Member States of the European Union; the three EEA countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway); and twelve associated countries: Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Malta, and Cyprus.

References ANU Reporter. 2000. “Asian Language Initiative.” ANU Reporter 31(4). Accessed at http://info.anu.edu.au/mac/Newsletters_and_Journals/ANU_Reporter/ _pdf/vol_31_no_04/news/language.htm. APRU. 2008. http://www.apru.org/about. Bonnen, James T. 1998. “The Land Grant Idea and the Evolving Outreach University.” In University-Community Collaborations in the Twenty-First Century: Outreach to Scholarship for Youth and Families, edited by Richard Lerner and Lou Anna Simon. New York: Garland. Accessed at http://www.adec.edu/clemson/ papers/bonnen2.html. Kong, Lily. 1999. “Asian Higher Education and the Politics of Identity.” Environment and Planning A, 31 (9): 1525–1528. Moran, Louise, and Ian Mugridge. 1993. “Policies and Trends in Inter-Institutional Collaboration.” In Collaboration in Distance Education, edited by Louise Moran and Ian Mugridge, 151–164. London and New York: Routledge. Universitas 21. 2006. “About Universitas 21.” http://www.universitas21.com/ about.html.

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Part III

Asia Pacific Learning Communities

I

n this section, collaborators in the Moving Cultures project discuss their experiences crossing the borders of traditional area studies through “virtual fieldwork.” These multiauthored chapters discuss versions of an experiment designed to address some issues of power and knowledge in contemporary area studies by taking area studies into the areas studied using technologies of asynchronous learning. Students in higher-education classrooms around the Asia Pacific region participated in online discussions and collaborated on assignments that thrust them into dialogical encounters with the other. They collectively undertook multidisciplinary and comparative analyses of processes of globalization in the distinct sites, with a particular focus on migration, tourism, and popular culture. What happens when the people who are usually the cultural objects of area studies are also virtual subjects empowered to talk back in area studies classrooms? What happens when different cultures of area studies meet and negotiate over their proper object of study? In the first chapter, T.â•›C.â•›Chang, Jon Goss, and Chris Yano discuss a modular interaction between two upper division seminars at the University of Hawai‘i and a larger survey class at the National University of Singapore focused on the tourist representation of place and peoples in multicultural societies. The instructors hoped that students would learn from each other about their counterparts’ identity and everyday life, and so form a nonessentialized understanding of the other. Applying concepts from constructivist theories of pedagogy, Chang et al. document progress of their students 141

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from simple “sharing and comparing of information” to “exploration of dissonance” between prior received knowledge and the personal experiences of their correspondents—and even to the “negotiation of meaning and coconstruction of knowledge.” Chang et al. found asynchronous interaction challenging, not least because in the case of international collaboration across Pacific Asia, asynchronicity occurs not just in the lag of e-mail communication, but also due to the real friction of distance upon diurnal time. In addition, limitations of the current technology, the unequal numbers of participants, time demands upon instructors, and contrasting educational cultures also frustrated the emergence of a genuinely “borderless classroom.” They found that not all students were equally able to transcend time and space and to unlearn the stereotypes upon which their cognitive maps of world geography were constructed. In the following chapter, Lisa Law and Jon Goss report a similar experience in a second modular collaboration between University of Hawai‘i and National University of Singapore involving two sections of an upper-division urban geography course (one section was online) with a senior class in cultural analysis. This interaction was organized around a comparative study of Chinatowns in Singapore and Honolulu, with the goal of moving the area studies classroom from a focus on “trait” geographies, or aggregates of characteristics of people and place within bounded areas, to “process” geographies that examine the role of global processes in the production of identity and difference. Students examined the making of ethnic enclaves under conditions of colonialism and their remaking into objects of tourist consumption in multicultural societies. Again the authors identify obstacles they encountered in the technology, the different composition of classes, the coordination of academic calendars, and the external demands upon participants. Although students progressed in terms of the interactive, constructivist pedagogy, differences in educational cultures led to the reassertion of stereotypes of Chineseness and HawaiÂ� ianness, which conspired to keep some participants “stuck” in the stages of “culture shock.” Nonnative students in the University of Hawai‘i classroom experienced the shock of exoticization as they were automatically included among “Hawaiians” in the imagination of the students in Singapore and so were incorporated into colonial stereotypes of lazy Malayo-Polynesian natives. Meanwhile, National University of Singapore students were insulted to encounter colonial stereotypes of the Chinese as hard workers. It may be that asynchronous learning technologies have only limited potential to enable border crossing in the sense intended by the participants

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in the collaboration, since the virtual other is always a disembodied representation. In this case, interaction was primarily in the form of written e-mail and discussion board texts, which can easily lead to misunderstanding and rapid escalation of personal umbrage. However, since the collaborative projects reported in this section vary in their degree of success in this regard, it is worth speculating why stereotypes returned with such vengeance in this particular collaboration. One factor was that the classes collaborating in this Hawai‘i-Singapore project were discipline-based and the interaction was additional to the class rather than an essential part of it. Later in this section, Hempenstall et al. advocate “clipping” modules onto courses, but the interaction in this case was perhaps more “clipped into” the contrasting courses, and students perceived that other components of value were therefore excised. The classes offered students a chance for a genuine encounter with the other, but crossing the border involved a detour from the primary destination defined in the course catalog and by their course grade. The fact remains, also, that the educational cultures of the two universities are very different. Participating faculty members were not unaware of this, of course, and differences in their own professional cultures were common topics of conversation between them, but they clearly needed to pay more attention to the effect of different academic standards upon interaction. It would have helped had their students also had some critical awareness of the production and reproduction of labor under conditions of colonialism and contemporary globalization. In contrast, Conrado Balatbat, Hezekiah Concepcion, Gerard Finin, and Ricardo Trimillos report on a collaboration sustained over many years between faculty members and students at Ateneo de Zamboanga and the University of Hawai‘i organized around themes of sovereignty, identity, and emigration. Courses on the two campuses were articulated in a semesterlong interaction in which students were invited to discover similarities in the nature of their multicultural settler societies, the experience of “localness” and geographical marginality within the nation-state, and also in their facility with creole languages. The authors emphasize the complementarities of professional interests and personal experience among the collaborating faculty, which others may have taken for granted. They also encouraged students to discover similarities in experience as opposed to the construction and confirmation of difference consistent with the relentless othering that characterizes most area studies practice. This emphasis, combined with an insistence on real-time interaction using web-based “chat” facilities, seems to have created a context in which mutual stereotyping was largely avoided. Balatbat et al. report some difficulties occasioned by the unequal preparedness of

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students within the classes at the University of Hawai‘i, the different levels of knowledge of students about each other, and the use of creole languages that created bonds and empowered some while marginalizing others. They feel that some students were overwhelmed by the unconventional mode of delivery, and that perhaps it tends to favor more advanced and better-prepared students. In the last chapter in this section, Peter Hempenstall, Robert Nicole, and Terence Wesley-Smith also report a suspicion that “e-learning” in area studies classrooms benefits students with higher levels of intellectual adaptability, though in this case they did not notice any significant differences in expectations of academic performance between the three institutions involved. They do observe a difference in “performance styles,” but they suggest that by fusing new technology with personal performance in the form of migration genealogies and other stories of the self, marginal voices were heard and indigenous epistemologies were honored. They suggest that students felt empowered by posting their presences on the Internet, performing and so producing their cultures. Hempenstall et al. developed an interactive module called “Oceania on the Move” that focused on the migration experience of students and societies in Hawai‘i, Fiji, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Illustrating one of the collaboration’s themes, the politics of indigenous peoples in settler societies and the contingent effects of external events on such international collaborations, participation by the University of the South Pacific (USP) was disrupted by a coup in May 2000. USP’s collaboration was vital to the goal of challenging the center-periphery model of academic hegemony, and fortunately it was able to participate in two subsequent iterations. The authors caution against overambition, however, as neither the world nor student worldviews will change through a single course module. They also exhort us to respect the resistance that students may put up to this form of interaction because of the perceived risks involved, not only to their own sense of identity, but to their grades. Once again, we see that culture is something we need to think critically about within and between our area studies classrooms, as well as within and between areas studied. The asynchronous learning classroom enables the virtual crossing of borders in area studies, but it seems that the potential to challenge mutual stereotyping will remain limited until the technology can facilitate something more like face-to-face interaction. As all participants agree, a great deal depends upon the personalities and personal commitments of faculty members engaged in planning and pursuing the collaborative projects and on the development and maintenance of goodwill between the student participants.

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Regular visits of faculty members and students to each others’ campuses and real-time communication certainly increase levels of trust, but what perhaps is needed is a context for interaction that is the equivalent of a shared meal. Is it possible to create contexts for virtual interaction conducive to the development of trust and allow the display of hospitality that is the basis of diplomacy and necessary for communication and exchange with the other?

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Chapter 8

Traveling Cultures Tourism and the Virtual Classroom in Hawai‘i and Singapore T.â•›C.â•›Chang, Jon Goss, and Christineâ•—R.↜Yano

Virtual classrooms have been touted as the wave of the future, proffering

access to information to a broad band of citizens unencumbered by specificities of time, space, and human embodiment. In this brave new world of cybernetic education, the idealized image is that of ideas and minds in a free, borderless exchange. Rich, Robinson, and Bednarz (2000, 266), for example, have argued that information and communication technologies “have the potential to underpin rich communications among staff and students from all parts of the world, support the exchange of ideas and information and, perhaps more importantly, provide alternative viewpoints and perspectives that may question beliefs unchallenged in the domestic environment.” This chapter examines a virtual or “borderless” classroom as experienced by instructors and students in an exchange between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) in the fall of 2001. As explained below, the subject of the four-week exercise was tourism, and instructors on both sides of the Pacific agreed to use their respective environments as laboratories for teaching and learning. However, we also realize that education is very much embedded in national cultures, a factor that increases the challenge of establishing international learning networks that involve “moving cultures.” Our experiences thus prompt a flurry of questions that we will try to answer. To what extent does a virtual classroom work to transcend the boundaries for which it is designed? In what ways do the exigencies of time, space, and human embodiment keep the virtual classroom moored to or in mimicry of face-to-face interaction? What 146

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kinds of learning take place in this virtual classroom? How does technology shape our expectations and the outcomes of the interaction? As technology propels us toward a borderless world, we must consider the new borders that we intentionally and unintentionally create, as well as the shadows of the old borders that we retrace. Our contention is that the liminality of virtual classrooms provokes a range of individual responses that are dependent upon cultural, technological, and personal factors. These factors shape the classroom that emerges out of a network of individuals sitting separately before the glow of their computer screens. This emergent process takes place in fits and starts and in a nonlinear fashion. It is both the process and the product that interest us here as we critically reflect upon our experiences.

Conceptualizing the Trans-Pacific Classroom To better understand the dynamics of the virtual classroom we focus on collaborative learning and its potential and challenges when transposed onto the World Wide Web and across disciplines, cultures, and nationalities. There exists a well-established theoretical basis for the advantages of collaborative learning in face-to-face classrooms (Johnson and Johnson 1996), and it is also said to be particularly “crucial to the effectiveness of online learning environments” (Hiltz and Benbunan-Fich 1997, 1). Constructivist theories of pedagogy conceive of learning as “a socially situated activity that is enhanced in meaningful contexts” (Simon 2002, 2), such that knowledge is actively constructed by individuals who are motivated to interpret their own experiential worlds, and where learning is perceived as both an individual and social process. The active presence of other learners, either in real or virtual space, provides a potential source of assistance and necessitates communication of ideas and information, resulting in the generation and internalization of knowledge (Hanley 1994; Fosnot 1996; Murphy 1997). In collaborative learning, instruction is learner-centered rather than teacher-centered and knowledge is viewed as a social construct, cooperatively and collectively developed by students. The role of the teacher is not to transmit knowledge to students (the “sage on the stage”) but to facilitate students’ construction of their own knowledge (the “guide on the side”) (Hiltz 1998, 3–4). Hiltz and Benbunan-Fich (1997, 2) identify three preferred outcomes of collaborative learning: first, students engage in evaluation and feedback of their work, resulting in clarification of concepts and reformulation of mental models; second, students are exposed to

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alternative points of view that challenge their understanding and motivate further learning (see Glasser and Bassok 1989); and third, group structure provides social support and encouragement for individual efforts. Similarly, Johnson and Johnson (1996) list the following behaviors in collaborative learning situations: giving and receiving help and assistance, exchanging resources and information, explaining and elaborating concepts, sharing existing knowledge with others, giving and receiving feedback, challenging others’ contributions (cognitive conflict and controversy leading to negotiation and resolution), advocating increased effort and perseverance among peers, engaging in small group skills, and monitoring each others’ efforts and contributions. In the area of online communication, Gunawardena, Lowe, and Anderson (1997, 412) provide an “interaction analysis model” where collaboration moves through five phases of progressively higher levels of learning: sharing and comparing of information, discovery and exploration of dissonance or inconsistency, negotiation of meaning and co-construction of knowledge, testing and modification of synthesis or co-construction, phrasing of agreement, and applications of newly constructed meaning. Online transclassroom collaborations are not without their share of challenges. Students from different cultures, social backgrounds, and attitudes toward learning may find it difficult to commingle with each other in a conventional classroom, let alone in an online environment. Mendler, Simon, and Broome’s (2002) experiences in teaching an interactive distance course across two British organizations, and Reed and Mitchell’s (2001) collaboration across two Canadian campuses reveal that while information technologies bridge physical space and encourage group collaboration, they do not always erase social and psychological distances to allow for trusting relationships to develop. The faceless and disembodied nature of cyber communication makes it difficult to feel a sense of commitment to a project or bond with a person. The time lag between campuses also means synchronous interaction is not always convenient. Different class sizes, university cultures, and student attitudes also may hamper smooth interaction, as we have experienced in the Hawai‘i-Singapore exchange. Given the traditions of our disciplinary fields of geography and anthropology, we are prompted to compare these experiences with more conventional fieldwork and to ask whether virtual field trips (VFTs) can ever substitute for field experience as well as for face-to-face classroom encounters. Stainfield et al. (2000) identify numerous benefits of VFTs, including low-cost and practical substitutes for in situ field trips, empowering students under financial constraint or with physical disability; independent learning by students at any

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time and any place; development of Internet and web-production skills; and relatively risk-free preparation of participants for immersion. Increasing safety concerns (in traveling and being in a foreign environment) have also recently enhanced the popularity of virtual learning. While he might not have intended to refer to virtual environments, Chris Salter’s (2001) dictum that there is “no bad landscape” in fieldwork might well apply to the borderless classroom. If international web-based collaborations engender their own borders and challenges to “moving cultures,” we have found that the virtual classroom nevertheless simulates cross-cultural learning experiences through student collaboration, information exchange, and critical engagement.

The Hawai‘i-Singapore Tourismâ•—Assignment A total of 180 students were involved in the tourism exercise over a four-week period in the fall of 2001. The class comprised 130 students in a Geography of Tourism class at NUS (Singapore) and 50 students from a Cultural Geography and an Anthropology of Tourism course at UHM. The students were divided into 25 groups comprising about five NUS and two UHM participants each. By interacting with their trans-Pacific classmates through various personal and group assignments, students were to gather enough insider information to create a sixty-second tourist advertisement (for television) for the other’s place. Students thus acted as expert sources on their “home” and engaged in the creative processes of marketing a new foreign “destination.” All interactions took place in a “classroom” mounted on UHM’s Blackboard site, accessible to students and instructors twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In the following paragraphs we reflect on the collaboration based on personal experiences—three instructors and one student—and on qualitative analyses of the students’ interactions and exchanges recorded in the archives of the discussion board facility on Blackboard. Extracts have been reconstructed from the archives and names and other references to personal identity have been redacted. On the Singapore end, online interviews were also conducted with select participants to elicit specific responses on virtual classrooms, cross-campus collaboration, and challenges encountered in the borderless environment. Our reflections center on three aspects: (a) the experiences of the liminal classroom and its facilitation of student collaboration, (b) possible limits to collaboration inherent in the new pedagogical tool, and (c) the challenges and implications of cyber collaboration for new modes of learning and teaching.

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Experiencing the Liminal Classroom: Collaboration across Borders The NUS-UHM exchange attempted to transcend a number of borders. Because classes at UHM were much smaller than those at NUS, the first borders we transcended were within the UHM campus between two disciplinary fields, as we combined two classes, one each in anthropology and geography, to form the UHM component. In fact, one student enrolled in both the UHM modules and thus formed her own transclass experience. Besides the intracampus transcendence, we also engaged in an intercampus, intercultural exchange. When observers speak of culture shock and its resolution, they acknowledge distinct phases in the process: (i) honeymoon phase in which everything different is wonderful; (ii) shock phase in which everything different becomes stressful; and (iii) integration phase in which some things different are wonderful and others are deplorable, but one picks and chooses, finding a way to negotiate between them. In the end, the person who has undergone culture shock and its resolution emerges transformed depending on key factors of time and commitment to the new environment. If we take a certain amount of the interaction in the borderless classroom as a form of culture shock, then what is missing from our project is sufficient time. Four weeks is not enough time to emerge from the honeymoon and/or shock phases into the integration phase. One has only begun to fathom some of the differences when the interaction ends. Furthermore, all participants enter into the interaction knowing that it is a finite, bounded, exceedingly short span of time. In effect, the honeymoon gets extended when you know the marriage does not ultimately have to work out. There are few long-term repercussions and even the annoyances seem petty and trivial because they are temporary. On the other hand, some Singaporean students were frustrated with the tardiness of some UHM correspondents, precisely because for them a grade was at stake. There was some frustration also among UHM students, but because the education culture at UHM places less emphasis on grades and determines grades differently, the effect was blunted. Despite the short duration of the interaction, meaningful exchanges and serious discourses did take place in the virtual classroom. Heather McMillen, an anthropology graduate student, shares her thoughts, examining both the processes of the virtual classroom and the information that passed through cyberspace.

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A Student’s Perspective on Peer-Collaboration on the Net Being in the liminal cyber-state between “professionally appointed Hawai‘i expert-student-peer and anonymous cyber-friend” inspired spontaneous and candid discussions. For example, I felt quite free to ask “dumb” questions. Although I was embarrassed that I didn’t have many more associations with Singapore beyond restricted gum chewing and accepted caning of law-breakers, I felt it was easier to ask for clarification on-line than it would have been in person. The formalities and cultural mores that usually guide our “getting to know someone” did not necessarily apply in cyberspace. In the asynchronous cyberclassroom it was acceptable for me to drop an email saying “Hi, it’s Heather again. I know it’s 4 am your time, but I was wondering what is a more ‘local’ favorite, Hainanese Chicken Rice or Roti Prata? And oh, by the way, how is the sex tourism industry in Singapore?” In other words, these are questions I would never ask so baldly, so abruptly, in this juxtaposition, or at this hour. I felt unconstrained by the social dance of face-to-face interaction. The on-line classroom enabled me to exchangeâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›current information about my own interests with lightning speed. The experts [i.e., Singapore students] were at my fingertips. They enabled me to acquire insider information on Singapore specific to my interests. I found that process very gratifying. My group discussions challenged associations of strictness and rigidity of Singapore, depicting it instead as a lived place full of spice—in food, nightlife, celebrations, fast-paced technology. In fact, my Singapore cohorts made it clear to me that Singapore is a food paradise. Their enthusiasm for and pride in the foods of Singapore inspired me to create my final project that I entitled, “Singapore: City of Spice!” Our trans-Pacific cyber-discussion with Singapore students truly made me hungry for more! Another interesting theme in my group’s discussion board as well as the larger discussion forum was the concept of a multi-ethnic society—perceptions of what that means, how it is represented, and how it is actually played out differ considerably in Singapore and Hawai‘i. Although people in Singapore talk about being multiethnic, the standard seems to be “Chinese”; furthermore, people seem to live in more overtly segregated enclaves than in Hawai‘i.

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T.â•›C.â•›Chang (1996) wrote about the tourist campaign’s promotion of Singapore as a multi-cultural place, which also served to promote a particular public discourse on local society and culture as egalitarian. Although this gained acceptance with some NUS students, it was criticized by others who said that the multi-cultural model was the superficial face of a Chinese dominated society. One of my group members was Indian; she echoed this belief when I asked her which languages people speak and which languages signs are written in. She told me that Chinese is definitely dominant and as a member of the Indian minority she notices this. This allowed me to discuss how Hawai‘i is also a very multi-ethnic place, but our tourism industry downplays that. In our tourism advertisements, “exotic” and “indigenous” people of Hawai‘i always overshadow the multi-ethnic reality (which ironically is in the forefront of Singapore tourism ads). Furthermore, local perceptions of tourism and co-optation of Hawaiian culture are quite contrary (if not in opposition) to those portrayed in tourism advertisements. I was able to share this with my NUS group and compare our experiences of real versus ideal aspects in our multi-cultural islands. The above interchange would likely have been very different if face-to-face in the classroom, and at the very least, it would have taken a longer period of time. The downside is that deeper discussion only came toward the end of our collaboration. I would have liked to explore this and other substantive issues earlier—but more of our discussions were specific fragmented bytes of information aimed at completing our assignments. To summarize, our communication on-line was enjoyable and polite, yet direct and pragmatic. We all asked what we wanted to know when we wanted to know it. The pace and schedule were our own. We were unrestricted by classroom time, talking in turns, and discussion of predetermined subjects. For the most part, however, the pragmatic orientation offset the potential for deeper discussion. The most frequently mentioned advantage of the collaboration from the students’ perspective was access to firsthand accounts of everyday life in the respective locations from native informants. They often found themselves disabusing naïve foreigners of their misperceptions of place and culture. One NUS student, for example, noted that Hawai‘i was not the “idyllic paradise” she had imagined:

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I really did not know what “ethnic groups” existed in Hawai‘i. I found out that Hawai‘i has a very multicultural mix of people too, and she [my group partner] told me about the market places in Chinatown which sound very€much like the street scenes in colonial Singapore.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›But she reflected that there are a lot of inequalities in Hawai‘i, like the indigenous people are often very poor and do not have many opportunities to move up. And she spoke about the high divorce rates and crime rates in Hawai‘i, which did not really comply with my image of the idyllic paradise. She also spoke of the interesting phenomenon of the Japanese “postage brides” [i.e., mail-order brides], like Singapore’s China bride phenomenon. While the cyber collaboration revealed differences between Hawai‘i and Singapore, it also opened up possibilities of finding common ground between the two cultures. On the Singapore end, participants began the exercise by polarizing Hawai‘i and Singapore. Singapore was “home” with all its attendant familiarities, whereas Hawai‘i epitomized the “other”—exotic, pristine, paradise. Through spontaneous exchanges like the ones described above, students were able to re-evaluate the boundaries between “us” and “them” and appreciate the porosity of borders separating cultures. Such a revelation in itself is a form of border-crossing—dismantling dichotomous thinking of places and societies. Through understanding the “other,” reflexive knowledge of the “self” was also attained as students had to represent their country to answer queries from their collaborators. In explaining “everyday” events and activities, participants had to communicate in simple terms aspects of local life that were often taken for granted. As one NUS student shared, By explaining Singapore to the students from Hawai‘i, I find myself re-familiarizing myself with these images. How does one explain the vibrancy of Chinatown at Chinese New Year? Or the Singapore Food Festival? How does one summarize a lifetime of sensations into a paragraph? This sudden need to define what has always been abstract has led to a re-examination of my environment. Yes, I would say that I have learnt more about my home. By looking at their “home” from a new perspective—the tourist perspective— students had to negotiate their own positionality as locals. It has been said that traditional modes of field inquiry aid students in “recognizing the multi-dimensional quality of landscapes, finding out the

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unexpected, seeing the familiar through new eyes, getting into other people’s shoes, removing blinkers.” (Pawson and Teather 2002, 281). The transclassroom experience has attempted to do no less, but such collaborations are not without their share of dissonances and conflict, and it is to this that our discussion now turns.

Negotiating the Transclassroom: Limits to Borderless Collaboration? A question arises about the degree to which existing borders—defined in the form of campuses, disciplines, cultures—were truly transcended in the processes of interaction. To what extent does the virtual classroom transcend conventional boundaries and in what ways does it reinscribe new borders? There are several factors that worked to limit our students’ border-crossing activities. First, and most serious, were the problems engendered by the meeting of contrasting educational cultures. Under certain conditions this may provide a positive learning experience, but for most of our students it appeared to reinforce biased and prejudicial stereotypes of industrious (Singaporean) Chinese and lazy (Hawaiian) natives. Students at UHM saw firsthand that the culture of education in Singapore is extremely competitive, and, from instructor down to students, the quantity of activity was high. This stands in contrast to the culture of education in Hawai‘i, which is far more relaxed, casual, and insistently noncompetitive. We learned that these contrasting education cultures can clash, as some Singaporean students became frustrated at some Hawai‘i students not completing assignments on time or work not done to the highest levels of effort, while some students in Hawai‘i were put off by the excessive zeal and onerous demands made upon them by their counterparts. To defuse the situation, we had to spend class time educating students about educational cultures. We found that despite our best efforts, some interactions resulted in the reinscription and reinforcement of difference and the experience of frustration at the brink of borders, rather than a process of mutual crossing. A second area of disconnect, which also exacerbated this problem, was the student ratio, with two UHM students partnering with five NUS students in project groups. This ratio meant that a single query or comment raised by UHM participants would be met with a deluge of Singaporean responses, some of them conflicting and many repetitious, while Singaporean students would often have to wait for responses, if any at all were forthcoming. As one NUS student reflected,

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what was disappointing is the number ratio. A team of six [NUS students] would only get about two correspondents from the other side of the world. They are often overwhelmed by the number of questions we post them and often they are not answered. It is a pity that the second correspondent did not do a single posting at all. The other student, at times, she must have felt lost when all our team members replied to her question with six different perceptions. Conflict of opinion need not always be a bad thing, of course. Student collaboration often progressed beyond what was earlier described as the “honeymoon” phase (characterized by polite conversation and mutual “stroking”) to a deeper level of debate and challenge. Following an initial period of “sharing and comparing information” (Gunawardena, Lowe, and Anderson 1997) on the topic of tourism marketing, for example, questions of authenticity and the politics of tourism challenged participants to critically reflect on place identity. The initial stroking later gave way to respondents becoming more analytical and offering corrections to what they perceived as misrepresentations or stereotypes of their respective place and culture. NUS students, for example, discovered “dissonance” in a British accent used in the voiceover in a storyboard for a marketing campaign designed by a group of students in Hawai‘i; in the representation of multiculturalism in Singapore; and in various icons used to evoke Singapore including musical instruments, waterfalls, ethnic foods, dragons, and lions. Similarly, Hawaiian students questioned the overuse of “aloha”; the representation of Hawai‘i as a destination of sun, sand, sea, and sex; and the equation of Hawai‘i with primitiveness and “nature.” Some of these are worth examining in more detail to give a flavor of the “progress” of student interactions. One discussion thread, for example, involved fifteen separate postings between two UHM and nine NUS students discussing the relative appropriateness of the proposed British accent used to market Singapore for a TV advertisement. Following two critical posts, the UHM student admitted: “After receiving feedback, like [their]sâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›[she] probably would have chosen another accent” and ended her post with a request for suggestions. Another UHM student opined that “in retrospect, [she] didn’t know what the heck [she] was thinking”! Further posts discussed the linguistic colonial legacy and suggested using a voiceover in “Singlish” (Singaporean patois of English), which then led to discussion on the relationship of language and national identity. In a gesture of concession, several NUS students even supported the use of the British accent to suggest sophistication and evoke a British colonial

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heritage that might be attractive to tourists. The thread ended appropriately with the suggestion that “Hawaiian counterpartsâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›look for a Singaporean classmate somewhere and speak to him/her to listen to our accent.” A thread on multiculturalism in Singapore also involved critical participation on both sides. UHM students were praised for their efforts to represent Singapore’s multiethnic society, but many posts were critical of what NUS students perceived as a bias in the marketing campaigns that marginalized Malay culture and landscapes in favor of Chinese. It was observed that even Japanese culture and cuisine were included as Singaporean and a sign of “exotic Asia.” In response, UHM students requested assistance in selecting images of “Malay-ness” and were offered a variety of alternatives, including food, music, architecture, and marketplaces. The thread continued with a discussion among Singaporean students of the relative merits of the dragon, lion, and “merlion” as symbols of multicultural Singapore. There is evidence here not only of reciprocal learning, but co-construction of new meaning: UHM students, for example, based on their own knowledge of Hawai‘i’s plantation history tested such an explanation for the origins of Singapore’s multicultural society, while NUS students learned to recognize the limits of their “official” multiculturalism. One NUS student wrote, for example: “I’m a Chinese and there is a limit to my knowledge on [M]alay culture but I love their food, which is usually spicy. Hope I can tell u more when I ask some of my friends or when any Malay student from this class reply u.” This is but one of many examples in which students questioned their own cultural assumptions, recognized the limitations of their own experience, and opened up to other proximate sources of knowledge. A third thread raises questions of authenticity and the politics of tourist representations in Hawai‘i. UHM students complimented NUS students on their work but corrected false impressions before a debate ensued about “authenticity” and alternatives to the conventional tourist experience of sun, sand, and sea. Participants proposed strategies to enhance authentic experiences of Hawai‘i, such as ecotourism, home-stays, and business/conference tourism that were then critically discussed. Remarkably, students acknowledged that the question of authenticity applies to the politics of cultural representation in general, and the discussion here complemented other threads in which students collaboratively interrogated the meaning of “tradition” and “traditional lifestyle.” They began to perceive parallels in their experiences with colonialism, multiculturalism, language (comparing Singlish and Hawaiian pidgin), and issues of authority in cultural representation, taking a crucial step toward the “application of newly constructed meaning” (Gunawardena, Lowe, and Anderson 1997).

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Students not only compared their own presuppositions with the “real” experiences of their counterparts, but they sought to explain cognitive dissonance within tourism by spontaneously “internalizing” theory from the course texts (particularly Boorstin 1992; Goss 1993) and other modules they had studied. One NUS student, for example, said in response to a posting: Hey guys, after reading Joanne’s response, I was reminded of something that my lecturer said during one of the geography modulesâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›which was regarding cultures. Cultures are never passive, although there is this debate that Western cultures are imperialist. However, the truth is, cultures are active and there is always a transculturation process taking place. Even though we talk about the Hawaiian cultures, or Singaporean cultures, have we ever thought that these so called “cultures” are not “pure” but a “hybrid”?? So in some aspects, Singapore may be more similar to Hawai‘i than we expect!! (remember the shaved ice??) Another UHM student acknowledged a basic principle of reciprocal learning, the internalization of knowledge through teaching, when she said: thanks to all the Singapore students for helping to create a kinda clear image of how Singapore is and how the “locals” areâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›the experience was fun and frustrating at the same timeâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›i was made aware that there are some things, some interesting things about MY culture that i didn’t think aboutâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›or jus took for granted. Areas of dissonance and conflict of opinion are invaluable in encouraging students to think through their viewpoints and to either defend their stance or concede. Through the rigor of debate and peer review, new convictions are forged. Such collaborations allow critical insights beyond the façade of tourism place representations. A UHM student, for example, reflected on the complex politics of representation after obtaining feedback from her NUS collaborators: Thanks for the suggestions, you know, I never realized the impact of marketing and how difficult it is to advertise a “place” to others. Also, the experience of having direct feedback from all the students has been great—you all show enormous creativity, talent and style.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I’m impressed with your workâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›and I’ve learned from you. Thanks.

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Similarly a NUS student opined that peer reviewing each other’s work, while defending her own marketing proposal, afforded insights into the politics of tourism marketing: It’s not so much that the stereotypes have been refuted, but that I’ve learnt to see beyond the image that Hawai‘i presents to tourists, knowing the effort behind the creation of this image helps to dispel its illusion. (emphasis in original) Applying Gunawardena, Lowe, and Anderson’s (1997) interaction analysis model, we can say that the students rapidly “progressed” (not necessarily in an orderly sequence, however) through the first stage of “sharing and comparing of information” to higher-order learning functions of “discovery and exploration of dissonance or inconsistency,” and even to the “negotiation of meaning and co-construction of knowledge.” The exercise effectively stimulated “reciprocal teaching” (Brown and Palinscar 1989), which enhances learning through “appropriation” of the other’s knowledge and repertoire of practices, and the well-documented “self-explanation effect,” whereby students internalize their own meanings through communication to another (Vygotsky 1978; Dillenbourg and Schneider 1995).

The Borderless Classroom and Implications for Learning and Teaching We have thus far discussed the virtual classroom in terms of student collaboration. Here we reflect on some challenges and implications of this new pedagogy for student learning and faculty teaching. The unrestricted nature of the virtual classroom comes with its downside. From an instructor’s perspective, the structures that we place upon our time in a face-to-face classroom—regular meeting times, office hours—are dismantled in the virtual classroom. What results is a classroom that never quits or the expectation of students that one’s virtual office door remains constantly open. In one sense, face-to-face instructors are always teaching too, as class activities and student problems weigh on our minds. We read the newspaper and want to bring a relevant article to the class’s attention; we walk our dogs and make a mental note of a solution. Similarly, e-mail, the telephone, and an open-door policy place us on call. Nevertheless, in an asynchronous learning environment the conscientious teacher finds the demands of constant teaching dramatically increased since one can always do something—such as following up those mental notes online before scheduled

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class periods or office hours—and students seem to lie in wait for responses to posted questions and comments. This sounds very much to the student’s advantage. But is it? Close guidance has its place in teaching, but so too does independent inquiry and autonomous motivation. We see a teacher’s main function as providing tools by which we can assure our own redundancy. We want our students to ultimately be independent from us. This may be more difficult if teachers are constantly available online. There were also various technological issues to be dealt with in the virtual classroom. With more than a hundred students logging onto the discussion forums and synchronous chat rooms, Blackboard sometimes failed. The slow download time and the occasional system “hangs” were particularly frustrating as deadlines approached. The eighteen-hour time difference between Honolulu and Singapore also caused delays as replies often came a full day after questions were posted. Hence, just as technology helps to collapse barriers, the overuse of Blackboard also slowed us down, and in some cases turned off students entirely from interaction. In the NUS cohort, two extremely vocal students for various reasons did not take to Blackboard. They were virtually silenced and were unable to complete their assignments, whereas in a traditional classroom setting they would have shone. The asynchronous online classroom experience culminated in an attempt at a synchronous online party. But this is where technology truly failed us. When the instructors conceived of it, we took as our model the cocktail party—free-floating conversations, people coming and going, some arriving casually late—with the conversation revolving around the experiences of the virtual classroom. Technology would not permit us to fully realize the model, however. For one, with so many people attempting to log on at or nearly at the same time, the computer system simply failed. Secondly, the simultaneities or near-simultaneities of face-to-face can only translate as sequential postings online. Therefore, one had to wait to see one’s response to a comment. That is, even if one typed in a response immediately and much earlier to another person’s comment, one’s response was but one of many and had to queue like all others in a backlog of interaction. Furthermore, on-screen, people’s entrances and exits to the chat room are duly recorded, each movement accorded one line. These entries are hard to differentiate visually from participants’ verbal interactions. The entrances and exits further spatially distance the responses one from the other. The cocktail party, then, became an exercise in frustration, with queries left dangling, tidbits of reflection nakedly suspended, and many would-be partygoers silenced amid the general noise.

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A final implication of the virtual classroom is its heavy reliance on “hearsay.” In terms of information exchange, students relied heavily on whatever their collaborators volunteered during forum discussions, rather than on their own senses of sight, smell, and sound. Conventional field and class experiences are far more auratic and multisensorial, allowing participants to soak in a place in diverse ways. Hence, while students were able to derive an intellectual understanding of Hawai‘i or Singapore, there were many knowledge gaps that could not have been plugged through the Internet. Although images were posted, students were unable to “picture” the respective physical geographies and cultural landscapes and the mix of ethnicities that make up the islands, nor could they hear accents or taste local cuisine. The virtual classroom seriously lacks the multisensorial environment that a traditional field experience is equipped to provide.

Conclusion The question to conclude with is not whether we should or should not engage in transborder educational experiences. Our world is shrinking too fast, our technology is too capable, and the demands placed upon our global citizenry are too great to suggest a retreat. We stand in a wonderful position to shape these virtual classrooms so that the “web-ed” experience can be made more meaningful. To that end, let us return to some of the questions we posed earlier. To what extent does a virtual classroom work to transcend the boundaries for which it is designed? Our experiences suggest that a four-week span of time may be too short to make these border crossings more meaningful than a vacation. This is not living in another culture, but only visiting, and virtually at that. So we are generally denied access to the lessons of culture shock. Yet virtual visiting has its merits. Engaging directly with people from across the ocean in a common activity with a purposeful goal makes us more than tourists (we become, instead, enlightened travelers). In what ways do the exigencies of time, space, and human embodiment keep the virtual classroom moored to or in mimicry of face-to-face interaction? Our experiences suggest that we, as individuals, are constantly pulled toward faceto-face as a model of interaction. Heather suggests that in an ideal world, this course would conclude with a visit to Singapore, followed by NUS students’ visit to O‘ahu, and students on both campuses mentioned this in the final group chat. The ideal model remains face-to-face, embodied interaction. On the other hand, virtual interaction can shape new practices relatively unfettered by time, space, and norms of sociality. Therefore, we found students

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interacting more directly, more spontaneously, and, of course, at all hours of the day, even if not always more deeply. What kinds of learning takes place in this virtual classroom? We found the learning to be both direct and indirect. We found trans-Pacific common interests and concerns, pleasures and displeasures. We also better understood our differences and sometimes just how invested we are within those differences. We became more conscious of our identities by virtue of having to define what it means to be American or Singaporean through this juxtaposition. This is an important lesson to be learned in the moving cultures classroom. How does technology shape our goals and expectations of the classroom? Students and professors alike need to be brought up to speed so they can share equally in a common language and equally access the virtual classroom. The failure of our final cocktail party suggests that we need to better understand available technological capacities. Instead of trying to turn an online chat into a virtual cocktail party, we need to understand the capabilities and constraints of technology so we can create from its assumptions rather than from our preconceptions. Perhaps one of these days we may complain of the limitations of face-to-face cocktail parties that do not live up to chat room capacities! We may grow impatient with conversations that seem to present only minimal overlap of interest with our own. We may reach for the click that allows us to change chat rooms, only to find ourselves stuck in place, trapped by our real bodies. Our experiences in the virtual classroom gave us a taste of the potential “cybernetic university,” where students and professors assume fluid roles as colearners. As we attempted to undermine some of the established borders of Asia Pacific studies, we discovered that others were not so mutable. In spite of the technological means to overcome time and space, these two elements retain a stubborn hold on our bodies and minds. Most of our students still feel the need to place themselves and others, and “Asia” and “Pacific” continue to insinuate themselves as bounded categories into our worlds. Such categories still lay claim to people’s sense of themselves in the world and answer fundamental questions of who, what, where, and why.

References Boorstin, D. 1992. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books. Brown, A.â•›L., and A.â•›S.â•›Palinscar. 1989. “Guided, Cooperative Learning and Individual Knowledge Acquisition.” In Knowing, Learning and Instruction: Essays

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in Honor of Robert Glaser, edited by L.â•›B.â•›Resnick, 393–451. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum and Associates. Chang, T.â•›C. 1997. “From ‘Instant Asia’ to ‘Multi-faceted Jewel’: Urban Imaging Strategies and Tourism Development in Singapore.” Urban Geography 18:542–562. Dillenbourg, P., and D.â•›Schneider. 1995. “Mediating the Mechanisms Which Make Collaborative Learning Sometimes Effective.” International Journal of Educational Telecommunications 1 (2–3): 131–146. Fosnot, C. 1996. “Constructivism: A Psychological Theory of Learning.” In Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives, and Practice, edited by C.â•›Fosnot, 8–33. New York: Teachers College Press. Glasser, R., and M.â•›Bassok. 1989. “Learning Theory and the Study of Instruction.” Annual Review of Psychology 40:631–666. Goss, J. 1993. “Placing the Market and Marketing Place: Tourist Advertising of the Hawaiian Islands, 1972–1992.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:663–688. Gunawardena, L., C.â•›Lowe, and T.â•›Anderson. 1997. “Interaction Analysis of a Global On-Line Debate and the Development of a Constructivist Interaction Analysis Model for Computer Conferencing.” Journal of Educational Computing Research 17:395–429. Hanley, S. 1994. On Constructivism. Retrieved October 21, 2002, from http://www .inform.umd.edu/UMS+State/UMDprojects/MCTP/Essays/Constructivism .txt. Hiltz, S.â•›R. 1998. “Collaborative Learning in Asynchronous Learning Networks: Building Learning Communities.” Invited address at WEB98, Orlando, Florida, November 1998. Retrieved October 21, 2002, from http://www.eies.njit.edu/ ~hiltz/collaborativelearning_in_asynch.htm. Hiltz, S.â•›R., and R.â•›Benbunan-Fich. 1997. “Supporting Collaborative Learning in Asynchronous Learning Networks.” Keynote address for the UNESCO/Open University Symposium on Virtual Learning Environments and the Role of the Teacher, Milton Keynes, England, April 28. Retrieved from http://web.njit.edu/ ~hiltz/CRProject/unesco.htm. Johnson, D.â•›W., and R.â•›T.â•›Johnson. 1996. “Cooperation and the Use of Technology.” In Handbook of Research for Education Communications and Technology, edited by D.â•›H.â•›Jonassen, 1017–1044. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan. Mendler, J., D.â•›Simon, and P.â•›Broome. 2002. “Virtual Development and Virtual Geographies: Using the Internet to Teach Interactive Distance Courses in the Global South.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 26:313–325. Murphy, E. 1997. “Constructivism: From Philosophy to Practice.” Retrieved October 21, 2002, from http://www.stemnet.nf.ca/~elmurphy/emurphy/cle.html. Pawson, E., and E.â•›K.â•›Teather. 2002. “‘Geographical Expeditions’: Assessing the Benefits of a Student-Driven Fieldwork Method.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 26:278–289.

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Reed, M., and B.â•›Mitchell. 2001. “Using Informational Technologies for Collaborative Learning in Geography: A Case Study of Canada.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 25:321–339. Rich, D.â•›C., G.â•›Robinson, and R.â•›S.â•›Bednarz. 2000. “Collaboration and the Successful Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Teaching and Learning Geography in Higher Education.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 24:263–270. Salter, C. 2001. “No Bad Landscape.” The Geographical Review 91:105–112. Simon, S.â•›D. 2002. “The Principles of Constructivism.” Retrieved October 21, 2002, from http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/302/302consprin.PDF. Stainfield, J., P.â•›Fisher, B.â•›Ford, and M.â•›Solen. 2000. “International Virtual Field Trips: A New Direction?” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 24:255–262. Vygotsky, L.â•›S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by M.â•›Cole, V.â•›John-Steiner, S.â•›Scribner, and E.â•›Souberman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Chapter 9

Chinatown and the Virtual Classroom in Singapore and Hawai‘i Lisa Law and Jon Goss

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he stated goal of the “Remaking Asia-Pacific Studies: Moving Cultures” project is to “develop an innovative pedagogy for area studies teaching and learning in an era of globalization” by establishing “multi-sited virtual classrooms [that] will take area studies to the areas studied, creating a collaborative pedagogy to apprehend situations that are at once transnational, transregional and intensely local” (Tanabe 1999, 1, 3). Our interpretation of this goal led to a web-based collaboration between students taking courses in geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) on a comparative study of the Chinatowns in Singapore and Honolulu. Students in both locations posted information on “their” Chinatown, including statements of personal experience, photographs and other graphic images, as well as quotations from interviews with residents. They discussed these with counterparts, and then worked in groups on a comparative analysis of the two locations. Critical comparative work provides an opportunity to move beyond traditional area studies approaches in that it consciously investigates similarities and differences across places rather than beginning from a starting point of single, autonomous locations. “Chinatowns,” for example, are a common part of the urban landscape throughout the Asia Pacific region; they are immediately recognizable as such and will inevitably be read as symptomatic of the presence of Chinese culture. Nevertheless they are created and are preserved under particular conditions, and while Chinatowns in both Singapore and Honolulu, for example, functioned historically as Chinese ethnic enclaves, the former exists within what is now a predominantly Chinese society and has been largely “beautified” to become an important tourist destination, while the latter continues to accommodate minority immigrants, albeit now predominantly Southeast Asian, maintaining its traditional role as 164

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a site of everyday commercial and interpersonal interaction, but remaining largely “run down” as it resists government efforts at gentrification. One of the aims of the project was to think about the problems and possibilities involved in comparison. In the new language of post–area studies, the interaction was designed to move beyond “trait” geographies in area studies frameworks—or geographies that emphasize foundational elements— toward “process”-oriented geographies that connect diverse areas in new ways. The distinction is nicely made in a paper produced for the Ford Foundation’s Crossing Borders initiative, and since it is no longer available online, we quote it here at length (Appadurai et al. 1997, cited in Olds 2001,129; see also Morris-Suzuki 2000): Much traditional thinking on “areas” has been driven by conceptions of geographical, civilizational and cultural coherence which rely on some sort of trait list of values, of languages, of material practices, of ecological adaptations, of marriage patterns and the like. However sophisticated these approaches, they all tend to see “areas” as relatively immobile aggregates of traits, with more or less durable historical boundaries and with a unity composed of more or less enduring properties.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›In contrast, we have begun to explore an architecture for area studies which is based on process geographies, and sees significant areas of human organization as precipitates of various kinds of action, interaction and motion, trade, travel, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytization, colonization, exile and the like. These geographies are necessarily large-scale, changing and tend to highlight variable congeries of language, history and material life. Put more simply, the large regions which dominate our current maps for area studies are not permanent geographical facts. They are problematic heuristic devices for the study of global geographic and cultural processes. Regions, in our approach, are taken to be initial contexts for themes which generate variable geographies, rather than as fixed geographies marked by set themes. Our Chinatown project was conceived to help students to move beyond “trait” geographies that see Chinatowns as material manifestations of culture, and toward thinking about how these landscapes are shaped by “processes” such as migration, racial ideologies, and tourism. This is not simply to replace cultural essentialization with the new universalizing framework of globalization, however, for even if exoticism and urban development combine to (re) make ethnic enclaves into objects of tourist consumption throughout Asia

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Pacific, a detailed comparison of Singapore and Honolulu Chinatowns shows that processes operate unevenly and combine contingently and that they are experienced and represented in very different ways. Our project was structured to lead students toward a “processual” understanding of the respective Chinatowns, and for the most part we believe we were successful. Nevertheless, at times, interactions were hampered by traditional “trait” thinking as some of our students confused Chinatown and “Chineseness” and mobilized stereotypes of Singaporean and Hawaiian cultural identities. In fact, at one point there was a clear breakdown in our collaboration, which we suggest was at least partly due to several unforeseen factors: first, since the vast majority of NUS students identified as Chinese and only a small minority of UHM students had any Chinese ancestry or exposure to Chinese culture, participants on the two sides generally had differential investments and assumed authorities in the topic at hand; second, as a consequence of the increasing pressure of deadlines, tensions developed between participants operating in different academic cultures, who were nevertheless equally dependent upon each other’s timely “virtual” cooperation; and third, as pressures of time mounted and perhaps as mutual trust developed among participants in the web-based discussions, communications generally became more ingenuous, and some took offense, responding with public recrimination or partial withdrawal from the collaboration. Having set up the collaboration carefully and seen it develop in the right direction, the instructors were caught off-guard by this turn of events, and we found ourselves desperately trying to help students think more “processually” about the others of our collaboration. Remarkably, despite the climate of mutual suspicion, some students were able to use the critical tools of cultural analysis we had promoted in our respective classes, but given more time and prior sensitivity to this problem, we might have helped other students avoid the trap of “trait” thinking and the sense of disappointment that they carried away from the collaboration. Our collaboration raised difficult issues about how we represent and engage with different people and places, and it was a serious challenge for all involved. We remain optimistic that web-based interaction can provide a valuable context for the mutual exchange of ideas and questioning of beliefs that are taken for granted (Rich, Robinson, and Bednarz 2000, 266), but we have become more sensitive to its limits and aware of the need for prior sensitization of participants and careful monitoring by instructors. In other words, if “virtual fieldworkâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›can allow students to carry theoretical concepts into confrontations with empirical representations” (Warf, Vincent, and Purcell 1999, 147), it can also allow students to carry stereotypical conceptions into

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confrontations with virtual others. We suggest that this is particularly likely where participants have differential investment in the object of collaboration, where time and other pressures are intense and unequal, and where educational cultures are most different. In the following, we recount the design of the project, reflect on some of these difficulties, and discuss the lessons for the project of remaking area studies pedagogies.

Designing the Collaboration on Chinatown The interactive component of the Chinatown project spanned a period of one month, during which students were required to submit four short assignments on the course website and to engage in regular conversation on the issues raised by the postings on a virtual discussion board. In the first assignment, students were asked to prepare a short paper titled “The Chinatown That I Know.” This was to be an impressionistic piece based on personal experience and perceptions of Chinatown in response to the questions: “What do you know about Chinatown? How do you know what you know?” In the second assignment students were asked to provide a visual image of Chinatown, based on real or virtual fieldwork, and to write a short response to the questions: “Why did you choose this particular image? In what sense is it representative of Chinatown?” In the third assignment students were required to obtain verbal testimony from a person in Chinatown whom they interviewed personally and write a response to the questions: “Who is the source? In what sense is it representative of perspectives on Chinatown? Why did you choose this particular quotation?” Finally, in the fourth assignment, students were asked to work in groups of four (two from each university) to produce a web document, including personal experience, images, and testimony, comparing and contrasting the Chinatowns of Singapore and Honolulu. They were asked to address the question: “What are the main differences in the two Chinatowns in terms of the landscapes, residents, visitors, and functions?” Below we present a selection of quotations from the students’ postings to illustrate the development of the project and to highlight some of the issues that were raised. Our aim is to provide some (relatively) unprocessed text that evokes the changing flavor of the interaction.

Comparing Singapore and Honolulu’s Chinatowns The first assignment produced a range of responses reflecting different levels of familiarity and engagement with Chinatown. For some students Chinatown

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is a site of childhood memories and family attachments and a place for the expression of particular forms of Chineseness. For others, this very portrayal casts Chinatown as a site of ethnic politics that marginalizes different views and experiences of Chinatown. Statements by NUS students include the following: When I was young, I used to go to Chinatown very often.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I remember passing by the old and dingy-looking shop-housesâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•› and the traditional medicine hall whose pungent smells were mixed with aromatic fragrances of coffee streaming from nearby coffeeshops. And a little further down the street, there were some elderly folks who found their pleasure and daily recreation in the Chinese teahouse, eating and chatting noisily with one another. The Chinatown in the works of many local writers is a place of nostalgia, of childhood memories, the setting of parents’ and grandparents’ life stories, the fountainhead of Chineseness in modern Singapore.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›But the Chinatown I know personally is much less glamorous and romantic.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The place is usually swarming with foreign workers from Malaysia, Indonesia and South Asiaâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›and older folks who either live in that area or go there for nostalgic reasons. Chinatown is a restless landscapeâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›since I have known it, physical changes to its landscape have been the only constant. When I was very young, my grandparents were hawkers in Chinatown.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›It was a long street full of people selling anything from fish to cooked food, everyone bargaining, and there was hardly a place to walk.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Vulgarities were part of the daily language, and no one seemed to raise an eyebrow when someone said something exceedingly rude in the social context of today. Being an ethnic Indianâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›the only reason that I have been to Chinatown is to visit the two Indian temples located there.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›From young [sic], I had this strong and vivid picture of Chinatown to be an ethnic enclave. This was further reinforced by the Singapore Tourism Board and school syllabus. Both these mediums had created a boundary that always gave me a sense of being an “outsider” whenever I visited the place.

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UHM students, on the other hand, say the following: Chinatown markets and people are colorful and culturally rich, and it is like a mini vacation to go there, at least during the daylight hours. I have been in the area at night while waiting for the bus, and the mood does seem to change a bit. It is at night that the underside of Chinatown showsâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›with homelessness, drugs, prostitution, etc.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I get the impression that the cops see Chinatown as somewhat out of their jurisdiction. My primary association with Honolulu’s Chinatown is with food and particular items related to annual holidays.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The Central Market is the only place on Oahu I know where you can buy things like bundled chicken feet (for soup), “loose” fish cake, pig brains andâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›things related to Chinese New Year (e.g. hung bau envelopesâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›moon cakes).â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Also, many village or family name associations have offices or a presence in Chinatown, e.g. the Choy Hung Village Association, where descendants from the earliest Chinese migrants to Hawai‘i have connections 4 generations later. By day I know it as a farmers market full of Asian varieties of fruits and vegetables.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The local Asian community comes out to buy the commodities not available in regular grocery stores.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I feel as if in another country where I do not speak the language and do not eat the food. By night, Honolulu’s Chinatown is a dark place with the homeless, prostitutes, and drug dealers.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The streets were dirty and rain was always welcome to wash the filth into neighboring Honolulu Harbor. After dark Chinatown was a place that would often frighten me. It’s only a few areas I can think of in Honolulu where the small businesses are still family owned, run by generations of family members.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Chinatown is the oldest section of Honolulu and it appears that way.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The older buildings are in decay but I think they have more charm, personality and character than those modern steel and glass structures in the business district.

While both groups express a diversity of opinion about the respective Chinatowns, perhaps unsurprisingly a persistent theme is Orientalization, although

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students do show varying degrees of (self-)consciousness here. While in the case of Singapore the object of the Orientalist discourse is mostly historical, in the case of Honolulu it is very much contemporary, so that if Singapore’s Chinatown was once a liminal space, Honolulu retains its “dark side,” particularly at night. These combined statements could be taken to reflect the reality of relentlessly efficient cultural and environmental modernization by the state of Singapore, together with the marketing of its multicultural resources by its tourist industry, while “progress” is slower in Hawai‘i and its tourism industry has little investment in the exoticization of its Asian population given the presence of a genuine “native” culture. On the other hand, without sufficient sensitivity to the specificity of the processes operating in the two contexts, the contrasting statements could be read as erroneous “trait geographies.” In fact, they were later reread by students as stereotypes that betrayed prejudice characteristic of the authors’ respective cultures. The second assignment generated a colorful crop of images and accompanying texts that revealed how students and others “framed” their Chinatowns. Generally, the NUS students provided photographs of a dynamic or “restless” urban landscape, in contrast with images of relative stasis selected by the UHM students. NUS students, for example, contrast the old Chinatown with the cultural theme park that has been created to maintain an Asian identity and attract tourists to the city. UHM students, on the other hand, focus on the persistence of traditional lifestyles and values. The contrast is not so much between new and old, however, as between legitimate immigrant enterprise and “shady” business, revealing continuity with colonial conceptions of the Chinese in contemporary multicultural Honolulu. One UHM student, for example, mentions the reality of “ethnic prejudice and racism,” but then betrays herself in a description of Chinese as “industrious” and “persevering.” In the third assignment, the students select “telling” testimony on the differences between the two Chinatowns that are emerging through their project. NUS students present the following: At first, it was a little weird, when the foreigners first came. But now it’s ok. Although sometimes they can be a bit irritating when they keep taking photographs of people. â•… —Elderly woman in the market [Before] Chinatown was made up of many narrow lanes that are linked up with stallsâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›[that] sold all sorts of groceries like the

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usual poultry, vegetables, flowers, household itemsâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›but the most interesting of all was live snakes and rabbits. â•… —53 year-old woman, part-time waitress I grew up in that shophouseâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›it’s now used as an office unitâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›someday I’m going to earn more money and get that place back. As I grew up, Chinatown grew old. â•… —25 year-old former resident Again these quotations engage with Chinatown’s contemporary redevelopment, revealing both nostalgia and dissent. In the UHM testimonies, however, Chinatown emerges as a place in decay, characterized by the presence of undesirables, but also displaying virtuous industry and the possibility of renewal: I see so many people getting all upset over who lives here now and what other people do.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›They should spend their time on more useful things like helping others out. â•… —Chinese-Hawaiian woman, 70 years old It’s gone downhill in recent times but it is still home to a lot of good people. â•… —Bus driver It is nothing like how it was before. The people are taking more pride because they want to attract others to their neighborhood. Now, we have more and more art galleries. They want it to be the Soho of the Pacific. â•… —Woman resident of Chinatown Snarfle-uglablah-hehhehheh. â•… —Drunken Hawaiian male, bar in Chinatown Finally, in the fourth assignment, students were required to write an essay titled “Comparing and Contrasting the Chinatowns of Singapore and Honolulu.” A summary of the project’s findings might include the following similarities: (1) important settlement site for migrants, (2) visitors include regular market shopper and restaurant consumer, (3) imagined as having dirty and dangerous pasts, (4) reflect multicultural populations, (5) have “good” and

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“bad” geographies, (6) have undergone gentrification, (7) involve complex contestations and negotiations, both spatial and social. Differences include (1) Singapore’s Chinatown is overwhelmingly focused on tourism development that relates to ethnic remembrance and Asian values, (2) Singapore’s dirty and dangerous past is compared to its bright and clean present, while Honolulu’s Chinatown is strongly associated with its current levels of crime and undesirable activities, (3) Singapore’s architecture is focused on the preservation of buildings and façades and the addition of global Chinatown icons (e.g., gates), while Honolulu’s revitalization has been related to cleaning up its image (e.g., remodeling sidewalks, adding streetlamps), (4) Honolulu’s Chinatown is not clearly demarcated as a space for the “Chinese.” In general, students perceived more dissimilarity in the contemporary use and form of the two Chinatowns. A UHM student commented: Singapore’s Chinatown looks like a beautiful shopper’s paradise. It is almost entirely free of pollution and crime, and vendors sell relatively more upscale foods and merchandise. People seem to take pride and often have fond memories about this place. At night, it’s lit up like a carnival. There appears to be a festive atmosphere with overtones of safety and assurance. Honolulu’s Chinatown is a magnet for customers looking for fresh produce/ spices that they could not normally find at the local Foodland or Safeway. Unfortunately, it also attracts a cornucopia of negative nocturnal aspects. The drugs, dirt and the desperately homeless come out at night. The day vendors and customers retire to their homes usually at least several miles away. Perhaps by asking students to engage in comparative work, we were bound to end up with representations that relied on stereotypical notions of both places: Singapore as a well-ordered and policed society that is good for shopping, and Hawai‘i as an American city riddled with homelessness and crime. Acknowledging these sorts of difficulties, one group refused the essentialization of Chinatown altogether: Chinatowns are not material manifestations of unique Chinese cultures as many would like to think. Instead, they are landscapes shaped by Orientalist discourse and tourist developmentalism.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•› [Both Chinatowns] serve as cultural sites that are pertinent to the definition, redrawing and regeneration of ethnic identities.

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Another group that attempted to move away from the binary of similarity and difference, and all the cultural baggage it inspires, wrote: The notion of “Order” is tied to the concept of power. Who has the power to initiate particular kinds of development in the Chinatowns? Who has the power to label, to affect how the Chinatowns are perceived? And whose purpose do these serve?â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Power also underlies the construction of the binary dualism such as that of the “Self” and the “Other”. As a method of study, it has been widely used to classify people and things as internally different.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Through the interplay of power relations, the “Other” is construed as underprivileged and seen as peculiar and negative.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›The “Ordering” and “Othering” in the Chinatowns of Singapore and Honolulu take different forms, have different impacts and result in different urban and socio-cultural landscapes. These insights, however, were produced by the more engaged students, who were simultaneously responding to and reflecting upon some of the difficulties raised over the course of the exchange. In particular, there were some sharp comments about the Orientalism, Occidentalism, and “mutual othering” that students felt shaped the substance of the interaction, problems to which we now turn.

The Problem of “Mutual Othering” While most of the group projects were submitted collectively, several groups chose not work together and instead decided to write projects individually or in pairs from the same class. Some Singaporean students felt their Hawaiian counterparts were reproducing Orientalist discourse through their construction of the area as crime-infested. In attempting to address this idea, one project report offered the following explanation: Singapore and Hawai‘i are very different in terms of their histories. As such, the Singapore students who come from a post-colonial Asian country largely populated by Chinese will probably have different perceptions of Chinatown from their Hawai‘i counterparts who come from a western imperialistic society with an extremely diverse population. Besides, the level of engagement with the field also shapes a person’s perception of the

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place.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Overall, Hawai‘i students have implicitly expressed their “outsideness” with regard to Chinatown. Their sense of outsideness is probably derived from their positions as western; they may see themselves as being different from the Asian population in Chinatown in terms of physical appearance and language. With these differences, most of the Hawai‘i students may feel alienated or displaced in Chinatownâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›when they do not understand how activities are carried out. When confronted with these ideas, however, UHM students felt that NUS students showed inadequate understanding of multicultural Hawai‘i, which in any case is only incompletely assimilated into “Western” culture. Consider this opinion expressed by a student from UHM: Undoubtedly, we all view the world around us with socially constructed blinders that do influence our perceptions. While the idea that Said’s concept of Orientalism could be a significant factor in the reason why Chinatown in Honolulu is associated with crime, it might not be accurate. I say this because although the Chinese are a minority in Honolulu, so is every other ethnic groupâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›the questionable characters in the neighborhood are never Chinese, they are either haole or native Hawaiian or some mix. I do not think Chinatown Honolulu could be considered an ethnic enclaveâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›if anything, Chinatown Honolulu is a socio-economic enclave for recent immigrants.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›Do the Honolulu Chinese have Orientalist “tendencies” because of the influence of US culture? Is it possible that some preconceived notions (from Singapore) of the perceptions of Chinatown by Honolulu residents could be influenced by “Occidentalism”, the assumption that a homogenous, uniform “western” culture exists, and that this is easily definable in the context of modern Honolulu? In general, the students used personal knowledge and web sources to compare and contrast their respective Chinatowns, and they discovered some important similarities and differences. But what became the most critical issue on the discussion board and in group projects was how one’s “position” affects one’s perception of place. As evident in the comments above, stereotypes of “Chinese” and “Western” were brought into play. In addition, students began to notice cultural differences in work ethic and standards of scholarship, which seems to have affected the quality of the interaction. In

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many instances, students did not seem interested in “unlearning” the stereotypes or discovering processual explanations for the negative traits they identified in their counterparts. Overall, postings to the virtual discussion board for the Chinatown project are sparse compared to other web-based collaborations described in this volume, although they tend to be lengthy and thoughtful, in part reflecting the level of the students (the UHM students were from a 400-level upper division class and the NUS students were in the last term of their Honors year). It is remarkable how few questions are posed, and many of these appear to have a rhetorical function. The discussion board reveals limited evidence of genuinely reciprocal learning, and the project work tended to be more cooperative than collaborative; that is, students independently contributed to a collective product, completing what they saw as their pre-assigned task, but did not necessarily proceed to appropriate their counterpart’s contribution or modify their own. With a few notable exceptions, the interaction did not proceed much beyond the “sharing and comparing of information” and the “discovery and exploration of dissonance or inconsistency,” which are the first two stages of the “interaction analysis model” proposed by Gunawardena, Lowe, and Anderson (1997, 412). Why did it not go further? There are many contingent factors that might explain the difficulties of the project, including the compositions of the classes, the effectiveness of coordination (the start of the interaction was delayed by institutional holidays that reduced the time available for more informal “getting to know you” interaction), and time pressures (NUS students were working on their Honors theses). The interaction also came earlier in the UHM semester, so no cohesive groups had formed, and about half of the UHM students were taking the course online, which meant they had no “real time” and “face to face” collaboration to anchor the asynchronous collaboration. In contrast, NUS students were more than halfway through their Honors year and had already formed a cohesive community. In any case, it may be advantageous to develop group relations and establish principles of collaborative learning in face-to-face groups before exploring this in online learning environments. Perhaps a combination of these factors might begin to explain why students found it difficult to work collaboratively, why according to one UHM student evaluation, “some of the members of the group wanted to go it alone—to work individually (instead of as a group).” In the course evaluations, NUS students complained that UHM students lacked necessary conceptual training and disciplined work habits, and they claimed that their perceptions of Chinatown had changed little as a result of the collaboration. One NUS student recognized that “it is perhaps apt that we

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are taking a class on Cultural Analysis [because] I have begun the module with certain stereotypes (about Hawai‘i and Chinatown in Honolulu)â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›which were proven untrue as the module progressed.” Others argued, however, that “cultures vary and it is not easy to work in groups at an international level” and that “it would be better to work with countries that are more similar in working culture.” UHM students were actually more negative about the experience, complaining of difficulties in coordinating their efforts and of the unsatisfactory contributions of their counterparts to their joint projects, but they noted that their perceptions of Chinatown had changed substantially through the experience. They too were guilty of cultural stereotyping, prompting one NUS student to note—the ironies multiply here—that “the effects of ideas like ‘race’ is very real and do not reside only in academic text. For instance, some discussion postings allude to the ideas of ‘Chinatown’ being a naturally dangerous placeâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›[and] one of our collaborators actually unknowingly express[ed] his beliefs that ‘Chinese’ are by nature hardworking.”

Toward a Criticalâ•—Area Studies Pedagogy Cosmopolitanism today, without a serious engagement with diversity, must degenerate either into tourism or into aestheticism, which are linked pursuits that can hardly advance the democratic potential of the modern university. â•… —Appadurai 1996, 33

Our aim to examine “process” geographies by critically engaging the ideologies of multiculturalism and tourism, and by bringing the voices of distant others into our classrooms, was a learning experience for all involved. While it was distressing that our carefully planned collaboration sometimes degenerated into versions of the mutual stereotyping we set out to critically expose, this is surely a risk of any project that seeks to move beyond the aestheticism characteristic of liberal versions of area studies. In this chapter we have highlighted some of our difficulties and suggested some of the conditions that produced and exacerbated them. But in hindsight, we now recognize that the way toward a meaningful pedagogy and politics might often be difficult and messy. Perhaps our main achievement was to help students themselves realize this, and our hope is that it will stimulate them to try a little harder next time (as it has done us). How then might we next time link the new process geographies with the politics of difference in our own classrooms, whether virtual or real? Process geographies are evidently not the panacea that will overcome the problems of area studies approaches, for they possess the potential to gener-

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ate new orthodoxies and hegemonic ideas that do not clearly address the politics of difference or the ethics of engagement. This does not mean that the move from trait to process geographies should be abandoned altogether, however, because it remains important to displace geographies premised on economic, social, or cultural essentialisms (see Morris-Suzuki 2000). Indeed, process geographies can create a space for new kinds of conversations to take place, such as the ones that took place between students in Singapore and Hawai‘i, where identities such as Chinese and Western and concepts such as Chinatown, multiculturalism, and Orientalism can be critically examined. The dialogical nature of the Chinatown project helped keep these politics in productive tension, even if sometimes to a debilitating extent, and could be usefully adapted to reinvigorate process geographies as they are practiced both within and beyond the area studies classroom.

References Appadurai, A. 1996. “Diversity and Disciplinarity as Cultural Artifacts.” In Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, edited by C.â•›Nelson and D.â•›P.â•›Gaonkar, 23–36. London and New York: Routledge. Appadurai, A., J.â•›Bhabha, S.â•›Collins, and A.â•›Guneratne. 1997. “Area Studies, Regional Worlds: A White Paper for the Ford Foundation.” Unpublished paper. Chicago: The University of Chicago Globalization Project. Gunawardena, L., C.â•›Lowe, and T.â•›Anderson. 1997. “Interaction Analysis of a Global On-Line Debate and the Development of a Constructivist Interaction Analysis Model for Computer Conferencing.” Journal of Educational Computing Research, 17╇ 4:395–429. Morris-Suzuki, T. 2000. “Anti-Area Studies.” Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational and Cross-Cultural Studies 8 (1): 9–23. Olds, K. 2001. “Practices for ‘Process Geographies’: A View from Within and Outside the Periphery.” Guest Editorial, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19:127–136. Rich, D.â•›C., G.â•›Robinson, and R.â•›S.â•›Bednarz. 2000. “Collaboration and the Successful Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Teaching and Learning Geography in Higher Education.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 24:263–270. Tanabe, W. 1999. “Remaking Asia-Pacific Studies: Moving Cultures.” Proposal submitted to the Ford Foundation. University of Hawai‘i: School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies. Warf, B., P.â•›Vincent, and D.â•›Purcell. 1999. “International Collaborative Learning on the World Wide Web.” Journal of Geography 98:141–148.

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Chapter 10

Salaam Mānoa, Aloha Mindanao Creating a Student-Centered, Real-Time,Virtual Classroom Conrado Balatbat, Hezekiah Concepcion, Gerard Finin, and Ricardo Trimillos

“I

dentity, Self-determination, and Conflict in the Asia Pacific Region: Mindanao and Hawai‘i” is an experimental upper-level undergraduate Asian Studies course. Internet resources provided the technological possibility and the pedagogical challenge for a collaborative educational endeavor simultaneously taught in two distant locations: the Ateneo de Zamboanga (ADZ), a broadly ecumenical private Jesuit university in the southern Philippines, and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM), a public land-grant institution in Hawai‘i. Our undertaking was part of the larger Moving Cultures project of the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies (SHAPS) at UHM, a Ford Foundation–funded initiative for remaking area studies.1 Specific objectives for the class focused on comparing and contrasting issues that are common to two island societies. For example, both Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao and Native Hawaiians in Hawai‘i form minorities seeking greater self-determination (e.g., sovereignty) vis-à-vis nonindigenous majority populations. Immigrant “settler” populations in both locations have destabilized traditional concepts of land use and produced cultural divisions that require complex negotiations of identities, rights, and relationships (George 1980; Osorio 2002). The peoples of Hawai‘i and Zamboanga, as members of multicultural societies, each with its own creole or “pidgin” languages (i.e., Chabakano and Hawaiian Creole English), create and recreate meanings of “localness” within the context of larger global arenas.2 These themes formed the basis of the course. The class was first offered in the fall of 2001 and, with one exception, has continued on an annual basis. 178

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Background The genesis of Asian Studies 491 (ASAN 491) centered on the notion that while critiques of area studies pedagogy have raised searching issues on many fronts, such critiques have in general provided little practical guidance for innovative ways to alter traditional approaches (Koppel 1995, 85–92). ASAN 491 was offered as an experimental class intended to address, at least in part, some of the weaknesses that have been identified with traditional area studies courses (Hirschman 1992). A fundamental goal was to combine the best of classroom-based instruction with new learning opportunities. The fundamental idea underlying the course involved taking area studies to the respective areas of study by using standard Internet technology. We were fortunate to have strong support from academic administrators for our cyberspace experiment. Even more importantly, the talented and motivated students who enrolled in the class were truly interested in making the most of our area studies experiment, engendering an esprit de corps among those participating in Hawai‘i and Mindanao. The objective of ASAN 491 was neither to substitute the classroom experience for the sake of convenience nor to embrace new technologies for the sake of economy.3 Rather, the collaboration was an effort to fuse established pedagogical principles of classroom interaction with new opportunities for dynamic synchronous faculty and student exchange using well-established web-based technology. Our desire was to enhance what occurs in a dynamic classroom setting with activities beyond the classroom walls that could reorient and further invigorate students’ learning experience. Before examining the dynamics, processes, and outcomes of the class, we will describe the way the course was established. The three basic features posited for the class— finding similarities, establishing peer collaboration, and drawing upon lived experience—guided this initial process.

Initiating the Project The SHAPS Crossing Borders project’s activities aimed at the site where the “culture” of area studies is reproduced—the classroom—to create an innovative pedagogy for area studies courses. Collaboration with the Philippines was of immediate interest for a number of reasons. First, Hawai‘i’s Filipino heritage population is significant, constituting some 22 percent of the entire population and constituting the second largest Asian population in the state. It is one of increasing prominence, with a number of individuals achieving national recognition in fields that include public service,

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professional sports, and the arts. Second, UHM has the only area studies center in the United States devoted exclusively to the promotion of Philippine studies. As Filipinos constitute the largest contemporary in-migrant group to the state (some four thousand newcomers arrive annually), there is a high level of linguistic and cultural sophistication among significant numbers of UHM students. The initial inclination by UHM faculty was to seek collaboration outside of the Metro Manila area, where numerous opportunities for international cooperation and exchange already exist. We recalled that in 1999 the president of the Ateneo de Zamboanga, Father William H. Kreutz, had visited UHM to express interest in exchange activities. This prompted preliminary explorations by e-mail, and subsequently a delegation from UHM traveled to Zamboanga in late January 2000 to discuss the feasibility and the shape of such a project.4 The initial two-day meeting explored a broad range of topics as we attempted to conceptualize how a course involving students from both universities might be structured. The Hawai‘i delegation did not arrive with a blueprint in hand. Rather, we engaged in conversations that allowed us to explore areas of mutual interest and think about how we could build upon existing strengths at our respective institutions. The Ateneo’s proximity to Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as to the Pacific island nation of Palau, was seen as having numerous advantages in terms of both overcoming traditional area studies boundaries (i.e., reification of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands regions) and examining some of the complex social and economic confluences (Emmerson 1984, 2–11). Moreover, Ateneo’s state-of-the-art computer laboratories and well-trained technical staff seemed to bode well for various forms of online exchange. Early in the consultation a core team of instructors emerged. Based on experience and interest, Conrado Balatbat and Hezekiah Concepcion from ADZ, and Jerry Finin and Ricardo Trimillos from UHM, decided they would take responsibility for the experimental undertaking.5 Critical to the learning process was a congenial personal chemistry and backgrounds that proved advantageous to strong working relationships. Both UHM partners were knowledgeable about the Philippines. Trimillos had lived in Sulu and conducted research in the 1960s on Tausug music; Finin in the 1970s and 1980s had lived for some four years in the Ilocos region of the northern Philippines and conducted research in the Cordillera. Both ADZ partners Balatbat and Concepcion were familiar with the United States and had family members living there. In addition, Concepcion, while studying in Boston, majored in American history. Shared experiences also crossed institutions: Balatbat (ADZ) and Trimillos (UHM) both are musicians and both studied

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in Europe, the U.K. and Germany, respectively. Balatbat (ADZ) and Finin (UHM) were raised in the Catholic faith; while Concepcion (ADZ) and Trimillos (UHM) came from Protestant backgrounds. Concepcion and Trimillos have ties to the Tausug of Sulu, Concepcion by ancestry and Trimillos through field research. These shared experiences, complemented by faculty exchanges at the two campuses, created a solid foundation for building a collaboration of like-minded peers and intellectual collegiality. Establishing a symmetrical relationship among colleagues was very important to the project. The UHM was concerned that the working relationship not turn into an asymmetrical arrangement, especially in view of the historical colonial ties that underlie the continuing imbalances of power between the United States and the Philippines. The logistics of coordinating the two campuses required frequent consultation and adjustment, especially because the academic calendars of the two institutions overlapped but were not identical. The academic backgrounds of the four primary collaborators were complementary to the themes of the course—Balatbat in religion, Concepcion in history, Finin in regional planning and Asian studies, and Trimillos in expressive culture. The commitment of each member of the faculty team to quality undergraduate teaching and the engagement with area studies were common perspectives from which to plan. Such commonalities and complementarities contributed to a mutually respectful working relationship at this primary level. Institutionally, the peer and collegial atmosphere extended to respecting individual institutional calendars, specific organization of the class, and disbursement of project funds. After the initial broad conceptualization of the thematic emphasis and agreement regarding how the experiment would be structured, both ADZ and UHM administrations left the development and execution of the course to its faculty, further reinforcing a coequal and collegial working relationship. In retrospect, the specific and individual backgrounds of the four principal faculty organizers—their lived experience—also appear important to our project’s high degree of success. All four colleagues had lived outside their homelands, had extensive knowledge of the counterpart society, and were experienced at cultural exchange and cultural code-switching. The lived experience of each was relevant to the minority/majority dyad: Balatbat as self-identified Zamboangeño (native of Zamboanga) with roots from elsewhere in the Philippines, Concepcion with simultaneous identities as Tausug and Zamboangeño, Finin as an Ilocano speaker and advocate within a Tagalog/Pilipino-speaking majority, and Trimillos as a second-generation Filipino American.

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Getting Organized It was agreed by the faculty team that exchange visits between students in Honolulu and in Zamboanga would allow the classes to become familiar with each other and provide time to cover the subject matter in sufficient depth. We wanted the course content to be guided by three central themes, noted above, which were also imbedded in the development of the entire project: (1) discovery of similarities between the two groups, (2) peer interaction as coequal colleagues, and (3) validation of lived experiences as part of the learning process. The title of the chapter purposely draws attention to similarities between the two sites: geographical marginality to a national locus. Similarity as a theme was applied to the political, social, cultural, and linguistic narratives for each region. The thematic emphasis on similarity, rather than difference, informed the entire undertaking. The Blackboard academic software initially provided the platform upon which the interactive collaboration was based.6 Hosted at UHM, it required no more than a standard web browser to provide equal access on both campuses. The site facilitated numerous forms of communication. The syllabus and selected readings were readily available upon opening to the site. Standard e-mail features supplemented message boards where threads on assigned topics were posted. Links to daily newspapers, both national and local, encouraged students to stay abreast of current events. Many of these current events were directly relevant to themes in the syllabus, especially after the 9/11 attacks on the east coast of the United States. Other links to webcams were intended to provide students in each location with a sense of place. A virtual “inbox” made it possible to submit assignments in a manner that gave faculty members equal access to students’ work. Each of these features proved useful, with students and faculty rapidly becoming adept at using the site. The four faculty members agreed that one of the most critical dimensions of reorienting area studies is overcoming the myriad forms of “otherness” that are frequently engendered by abstract discussions about a certain people or specific groups living in a particular place. It was for this reason that we invested just under half of our time in the “virtual classroom,” a synchronous, real-time, interactive “chat” feature that allows us to have small group conversations based on topics that were informed by common readings. Use of the virtual classroom was seen as a way for students and faculty members to connect in a manner that promoted immediacy and spontaneity, thereby getting beyond notions of otherness. Our decision to use this method of “live” communication once each week was based on the hunch that it would

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make students considerably more interested in the readings and classroom discussion about Hawai‘i and Mindanao. The class times in the two locations were by design simultaneous: in Honolulu Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3:30 pm and in Zamboanga, crossing the international date line, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10:30 am. The real-time component depended upon two aspects of scheduling: the differences in time zones, noted above, and differences in the academic calendars. The academic calendars posed the larger challenge. The fall term emerged as the closest match, but even then the window for simultaneous class sessions was at maximum eight weeks, from the third week in August until the second week of October. The initial plan called for UHM faculty to visit Zamboanga during the June–August period and the ADZ faculty to come to Honolulu during the October–November period. Thus there would be a total of fourteen weeks of exchange for each campus—six weeks of faculty exchange and eight weeks of real-time Internet interaction. The duration of sustained exchange was longer than any of the other projects developed in the UHM Crossing Borders initiative. Although the foregoing was optimal, the actual period of structured contact was slightly shorter, particularly for the ADZ students. To address this imbalance, UHM faculty members were invited to have two-week visiting lecturer appointments at ADZ each August. Unless precluded by security concerns, UHM faculty members made these visits to Mindanao near the beginning of the ADZ semester. Occasional transmission problems also interrupted chat sessions, but this proved the exception. ADZ colleagues had an average of seven weeks of exchange. However, students frequently established personal e-mail exchanges and alternative chat times outside the scheduled class hours, suggesting the way the course facilitates student empowerment and peer interaction. On several occasions, when budget permitted, UHM students had the benefit of thirteen to fourteen weeks of exchange, with visits by three ADZ faculty and, in 2002, when two students from ADZ were able to obtain visas for a two-week stay at UHM. At UHM the students met Tuesdays in their assigned classroom and Thursdays online in the virtual classroom. The students liked the Thursday sessions because they could log on from home, from work, or from various computer centers on campus. The Tuesday class meetings included lectures, films, guest speakers, and discussion. For the eight weeks of structured Internet contact, Tuesdays were opportunities to discuss and ask questions about the previous Thursday chat session. During ADZ visits, the UHM students convened on both Tuesdays and Thursdays, while Internet discussion boards and postings continued outside the class time.

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Makingâ•—ASAN 491 Happen The three major themes—sovereignty, identity, and emigration—are part of the lived experience of most, if not all, the students on both campuses. Public and government information about self-determination informs UHM students about the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement as it informs the ADZ students about the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and the Bangsa Moro (Muslim Nation) movement (McGregor 2002; Abinales 1998). Contested and multiple identities are deeply rooted in personal experience. For example, is the predominant identity for the Hawai‘i student/ Zamboanga student one of nationality (American/Filipino), of region (“local”/Zamboangeño), or of ethnicity (Native Hawaiian/Tausug)? As revealed during discussions in the virtual classroom, in different contexts one set can be more meaningful than another. Finally, emigration is a question of not only who came from somewhere else but also who came first. The majority of both UHM and ADZ students have a history of in-migration to their present location. The theme of emigration required knowledge and recitation of family lineage, again an aspect of lived experience and an important cultural value for the Philippines and for Hawai‘i. Initially there was a need to make students comfortable with the software. During the second week of the seminar, all students met for an orientation in a computer lab. Having set up the virtual classroom in advance, including passwords, we then proceeded through a series of exercises to demonstrate the various features. While not all the students had equal levels of comfort with the technology, it did not take long before the basic exercises allowed everyone to navigate their way around the site. In order to make the chat manageable, the students were divided into ADZ/UHM groups of seven or eight participants. Every chat session included a discussion agenda with several challenging questions to be addressed.7 These sessions were studentdriven, although faculty members “visited” the various groups while the virtual classroom was in session. At times conversations digressed substantially, and it was necessary for faculty members to guide students back to the main topic of the session or to clarify points that were not well-understood. Each group produced collaborative assignments, which were posted for all to read. As with traditional group assignments, group members did not always find it easy to collaborate, and as a result the quality of the submissions was uneven. Over time, students became increasingly fond of sharing pictures and other graphics both as synchronous and asynchronous postings. To assist with group projects, some readings were made available as web documents or through links to other websites.

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Various types of individual assignments have attempted to help students synthesize what they have learned in both the physical and virtual classrooms. One of the most revealing ways to make this assessment has been to assign students to prepare a memorandum for a public official planning to visit Mindanao or Hawai‘i. The range of synthesis has varied dramatically. Some memos have provided a model of lucidity and comprehensiveness, while others, if followed, would likely have placed the visiting official in harm’s way!8 Philippine and Hawai‘i online newspapers were particularly valuable for linking class topics to current events. The Zamboanga SunStar and the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin became popular sites for keeping abreast of breaking news. Following the events of 9/11, for example, Zamboanga was the first destination where American troops were deployed, with military planes from Hawai‘i landing at the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Southern Command near the ADZ campus. Through these newspaper links, ADZ and UHM students followed these dramatic events, as well as the politically inspired Zamboanga hostage taking in 2001 and the city bombings in 2002 and 2005. The instantaneous exchange of information and the opportunity to discuss it with ADZ students on-site added an intensity and urgency to the learning process. UHM members sent expressions of concern to ADZ colleagues during those times. To the UHM students’ amazement, some ADZ students resolved to log on even when the university suspended classes as a result of the bombings, going to Internet cafes and malls to join the Thursday online sessions with updates. Peer exchange through the real-time Internet chat discussions stimulated new forms of communication and learning that were not wholly predictable. The shift from the traditional brick and mortar classroom to the virtual classroom also required something of a mental transition for faculty members and students alike that included accommodation of considerably more studentto-student interaction and learning. Given that students had never visited the areas of study outside their respective islands, some of the questions raised by their peers were not the kind of queries the students were accustomed to answering, for example, “Aren’t you all Hawaiians in Hawai‘i?” Alternatively, UHM students tended to think that most if not all Filipinos in Mindanao are Muslims. Although the students from Hawai‘i and Mindanao had varying levels of lived experience in their own communities, these experiences did not necessarily mean that they had the knowledge base required to fully explain their own societies and cultures. Lacking this foundation, the common readings and faculty-guided classroom discussions about both societies were particularly important.

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The exchange empowered students on both campuses for a variety of reasons. Many of the UHM students were Filipino Americans, with varying degrees of fluency in Filipino. This linguistic ability engendered a confident and at times convivial tone. However, to ensure inclusiveness, the substantive exchanges were conducted in English. ADZ students had a good grasp of English as well as some knowledge of Hawai‘i or the United States more generally, and this provided useful points of intersection with the UHM group. The empowerment of students was especially evident during the 2002 visit of two ADZ students to the Hawai‘i campus, during which time they conducted most class discussions. What also became clear early in the experiment was that Internet discussions tended to mitigate the omnipresent authority of the faculty found in the classroom. Absent the faculty recognition that normally follows students’ raising of hands before speaking in the traditional classroom, students participated more fully and possibly at times too enthusiastically! If a long time elapsed without input from a particular student, the faculty ordinarily made an effort to bring that person into the conversation with a question. Students themselves did not always agree with the statements of their peers, prompting even more discussion. One of the unexpected features of many virtual classroom sessions involved students in the same group engaging in the discussion of multiple topics at the same time. Part of the reason for this stemmed from the slight time delay between when a message was sent and when it was received. In other instances students took time to carefully compose their responses to questions and comments, with others in the classroom jumping in during the lag time. If faculty members were at times mildly disconcerted by this seeming cacophony, none of the evaluations made mention of the difficulty of following multiple online discussions simultaneously. Students showed no apparent problem with multiple virtual classroom conversations about topics that had little relation to each other. On the other hand, UHM students’ familiarity with the Philippines was far from uniform, and this presented a major challenge. University of Hawai‘i international students from the Philippines had good general knowledge of Philippine history and geography. Local or North American–born Filipino American students had a more limited knowledge base, and a small number of students (e.g., international students from Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan) had little information about the Philippines. Background specific to the southern Philippines was almost uniformly minimal. Equally taxing at times was that there was far too little familiarity among students with Native Hawaiian history and issues. Our expectation that Native Hawaiian students or Hawaiian Studies majors would participate in the course did not

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materialize. Thus it was necessary to provide extensive expository content concerning the three major themes relevant to the two regions through invited Native Hawaiian guest lecturers, films, website postings, readings, and class presentations. The general plan for the course over each of the four semesters was successful, although not all the individual goals were fully realized. With this noted, we share some of our pedagogical outcomes and insights.

Significant Learning Experiences for Students and Faculty Members The strength of an approach stressing guided student-to-student learning is perhaps best revealed by the transformations in students’ perspectives. ADZ students for the most part came to the course with an awareness of Hawai‘i informed by media-based images or secondhand accounts from relatives who have migrated. They embraced Hawai‘i’s reputation as an unparalleled funfilled tourist destination as well as notions of universal affluence among all elements of society. The initial interest in direct Internet interaction with UHM students was perhaps rivaled only by the desire to visit or pursue studies in what was generally seen as a paradisiacal setting. It was not unusual in the early part of the semester for ADZ students to articulate the hope that their own society might one day be like that of contemporary Hawai‘i. While not confronting students’ stereotypical images directly, the syllabus was structured to encourage forms of intellectual engagement that delve much more deeply into the ways Hawai‘i’s colonial experience created a society where issues of inequality and injustice remain as major challenges. Beginning with an examination of the way ethnic categories are defined, ADZ students soon see differences. Students from Hawai‘i were quick to point out that not everyone who is born or resides in Hawai‘i is “Hawaiian.” During the online sessions it was ordinarily noted that the generally accepted view of “Native Hawaiian” as a form of identity is based on one’s ability to establish ancestry or a genealogical lineage tracing back to the time before British navigator and explorer Captain James Cook first came to Hawai‘i in 1778. In contrast, UHM students learned from their ADZ peers that the idea of Filipino is not linked in a parallel fashion to those living in the archipelago prior to the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. This destabilizing of what many students saw as “natural” categories was followed by readings and online discussions of the development of Hawai‘i’s sugar and pineapple plantation economy, and the accompanying importation of large numbers of laborers from around the globe.

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For most ADZ students, the creation of Hawai‘i’s multiethnic and multicultural society was viewed most favorably because of their attraction to diversity, what a student once termed “the best of all worlds.” Yet most ADZ students’ fundamental view changed after subsequent analysis and discussion of Native Hawaiian population decline due to introduced diseases, overthrow of the national government in 1893, the alienation of Hawaiian lands through the Mahele beginning in 1848, and the gradual shift from Native Hawaiians being the majority population to being a minority population. As the ADZ students came to see themselves as “indigenous people” of the Philippines, i.e., those with deep ancestral roots in the Philippine archipelago, there was far less certainty about the desirability of emulating Hawai‘i. Especially striking was an exercise in which ethnic categories as a percentage of population in Hawai‘i (e.g., Americans of European, Japanese, Chinese ancestry) were, for purposes of comparison, projected to the contemporary Philippines. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of ADZ students made it clear they do not wish to ever become a minority people in what they consider their homeland. This dimension of the course was interesting in another respect because it highlighted the “minority” status of Muslims in Zamboanga. UHM students for the most part began ASAN 491 with their own preconceptions and stereotypes about the Philippines in general and the southern Philippines in particular. Given the high percentage of Filipino American students, many impressions were based on parents’ and grandparents’ reflections. Prejudices and misconceptions about Mindanao as an inherently unstable and violent place, especially since its identification as a strategic battlefield in the post-9/11 American “war on terror,” was frequently mixed with a curiosity about Zamboanga as a site of the “exotic,” where Muslim traders from other parts of insular Southeast Asia market their goods. Readings and classroom discussion that illuminated the southern Philippines’ ethnolinguistic diversity as well as the histories of Christian and Islamic traditions provided a foundation for understanding Mindanao today (Majul 1973). The Philippine government’s decades-old policy of encouraging the internal migration of Christian Filipinos onto “homestead” lands that were seen by indigenous residents as Mindanao’s “ancestral domain” had resonance for UHM students who had studied Hawai‘i’s history. Documentary films highlighting contestations over land and power in both sites increased sensitivity to these issues and made Mindanao considerably less alien. A consistent strength of the seminar for UHM students was the online discussions focusing on Christian-Muslim relations. Given the near absence

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of Islam in Hawai‘i and current high-profile debates about Islam and the West, UHM students gained much from being able to directly interact with Muslim and Christian students attending a Jesuit university where Islamic religious practices are encouraged. The positive tenor of the exchanges is evident in the conversations recorded in the virtual classrooms. The excerpts found below also help to convey the variety and the diversity that enriched our collaborative exchanges. The dynamics and implications of language and language switching were instructive. “Standard American English”9 was the common medium of communication in both institutions. For Philippine tertiary institutions English continues to be the major language of instruction, although the national language Pilipino/Tagalog is an increasingly popular alternative. Taglish, which involves the mixing of English and Pilipino, is for many students almost unconscious. In the chat sessions, standard English was the most formal level of English used. This was the practice for exchanges between ADZ and UHM students and between students and the professors. Cybernet English, with its own punctuation and grammar, frequently appeared when the ADZ and UHM students conversed with each other. Students discovered that language could be nuanced in a number of ways, often to indicate social distance between the parties of exchange, or in some cases by UHM students using their knowledge of Pilipino to assert their “Filipino-ness.” ADZ student to UHM student:╇ “couldn’t hurt to say a few words@ (name)” UHM student to ADZ student:╇ “What do you mean (name)?” UHM to ADZ:╇ “Kewlâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›so any guide q’s to answer?” (October 3, 2002, Grupong Blue). However when two ADZ students communicated with one another they often reverted to Taglish, a communication mode of comfort and reduced social distance employed in most semiformal Filipino exchanges. ADZ student #1:╇ “what are the questions ba Kurt” [“ba” is the Tagalog question marker] ADZ student #2:╇ “talen, tungkol sa bombings nung isang gabiâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›napalayo na ang usapan namin” [Talen, {we are talking} about the bombings the other nightâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›it’s far from our {announced discussion} topic.] (October 3, 2002, Grupong Blue).

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ADZ student #1:╇ “ life in the philippines is so hardâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›no moneyâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›heheâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›peso is devaluating” ADZ student #2:╇ “ yah, ate joy is right” [ate, “older sibling,” is a term of respect; Joy is an ADZ student’s first name]. ADZ #1:╇ “buti pa ang dollars” [“the dollars are good” referring to Filipinos migrating to the United States who receive comparatively high wages]. ADZ #2:╇ “may tao” [“there are people”]. ADZ #1:╇ “hindi tayo dollarsâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›kidding” [“we don’t have dollars, just kidding”] “i have plans of looking for job in Australia or pwede rin sa US” [“or possibly in the U.S.”] (October 10, 2002, Grupong Orange). Similarly, locally born UHM students sometimes used pidgin, the local creole, mixed with standard English when communicating with one another. UHM #1:╇ “w/ sovereignty here there’s so much junk talk” [with sovereignty here there is a lot of negative rhetoric]. UHM #2:╇ “yeh for real, da kine hard that’s why” [“that’s true, for a lot of reasons it is difficult to achieve this”] (September 9, 2001, Grupong Blue). The use of creoles specific to the Philippines and to residents of Hawai‘i left many participants in the dark during the exchange, or at least it disadvantaged them. For example, most UHM students have no Pilipino language background, so when the conversation shifted to Taglish they were excluded from the exchange. Sometimes their frustration was expressed in the chat with the single phrase, “English please.” For a minority of UHM students with some control of Tagalog, the ADZ chat in Taglish provided an opportunity to engage their Tagalog skills and in some cases use the same form, an empowering occasion and certainly a validation of their own experience. Those with Tagalog experience included Filipino nationals who were UHM foreign students, some locally born Filipino Americans, and at least one nonFilipino student with four years of Tagalog classroom study. A similar kind of language mixing occurred occasionally among local Hawai‘i students. When they chatted with one another they occasionally used pidgin words or phrases. But the mixing of pidgin and standard English was never as extensive as the Tagalog and English mix of Taglish. The nonlocal UHM students found themselves marginalized in this kind of exchange, although not completely excluded. The ADZ students found the pidgin/standard English mix interesting because they had assumed a

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uniform English for the entire United States. It provided a concrete illustration of local identity, both for the ADZ students and for the nonlocal UHM students. Such language usage brought greater awareness of how our own language practices are often taken for granted and naturalized and how these practices construct degrees of social distance, paradigms of identity, and groupings of inclusion or exclusion. It subsequently made everyone more aware of how they used language in the chat exchanges. Interestingly, students knew that assignments were to be written in formal English without being told. The various language practices also resonated with the three underlying themes of finding similarities (and therefore pointing out differences), coequal peer exchanges, and validation of lived experience.

Educational Outcomes For UHM students, the educational outcomes emphasized qualitative rather than quantitative learning. It was less about “facts” and more about general issues, such as the impact on individuals of national events, interacting with respect and with cultural sensitivity, and hearing the attitudes of their Filipino peers about the United States and about world events. It became clear to the students how complex the Mindanao situation was and that the easy trope of Muslims against Christians was no longer a satisfactory way of understanding it. They also learned about the high quality of education at ADZ. The two students who visited the UHM campus were bright, articulate, and wellinformed, and they took the initiative of engaging our students in a proactive way. Unlike the open enrollment policy for the UHM course, however, it is notable that ADZ students were “selected” by the faculty to participate in the seminar as a special elective. The interaction with the ADZ faculty on a long-term basis and in a number of settings was personally enriching as well. For Trimillos, it was a reconnection with the area of his initial field research; because of the political tensions it had not been possible to return for quite a few years. Finin’s exposure to the southern Philippines complemented his years of specializing in the study of the northern Philippines. Both UHM faculty members worked in a more consultative mode than usual, since a single individual with a single “voice” characterizes most classes. The reflexivity required before interacting with the students was a different experience, and in retrospect it was useful for interrogating our own assumptions and biases. While Concepcion had studied in the northeastern United States and Balatbat had studied in the U.K., neither had previously taught in the United States.

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Student evaluations were mostly positive. A review of written evaluations by UHM students from 2001 to 2005 revealed consistent enthusiasm for the comparative approach, with numerous comments indicating how, through the study of Mindanao, it was possible to gain new insights about Hawai‘i. “It’s a very strong method of learning about areas,” concluded one student. Although it was not an explicit goal of the course, many evaluations discussed how much knowledge about Philippine culture was gained. A “getting to know you” excursion to a local Filipino restaurant at the beginning of the semester also proved popular. For some students without significant understanding of Hawai‘i’s history, the idea of Hawai‘i as a colonial state was entirely new. Wrote one student, “I liked theâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›connection between two different yet similar cultures and their struggle for independence: Hawaiians and Muslim Mindanao.” One student wrote that fellow students should take the seminar because it is “interesting and controversial.” Without exception, however, the evaluations’ most consistent finding regarding what students liked most about the course centered on the realtime interactive dimension. The concept of taking area studies to the area of study was firmly embraced. Comments included: Because you are able to talk to other students in the region, and you are discussing what you are reading about, you’re able to get more opinions, views, insights. Online experience is for real, not out of a book. [T]he chance to interact with students from Zamboanga is priceless. [It allowed me] to learn more about my culture directly. Suggestions for improvement often noted the need for more time in the virtual classroom, more time to interact with ADZ faculty, and the chance to meet ADZ students in person. Some students who lacked foundation courses in Philippine studies noted that at times they felt a bit overwhelmed. A small number of evaluations opined that the course offered too much information on certain topics (e.g., “Muslim organizations like MILF and MNLF were too complicated and hard to understand”). Other students were challenged by the fact that the syllabus did not always move in a linear fashion, and they wanted more clearly defined structure for the online discussions and a required textbook.

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Conclusion The strongest evidence of ASAN 491’s success is its continuity since 2001. Of all the experimental courses and course modules that were part of the Moving Cultures project, only ASAN 491 is still being sustained. Key to the course being offered each year was an approach that sought to find similarities, make the exchange coequal, and draw upon lived experiences. In addition, strong institutional support, continuity of personal commitment and mutual support among the four-person faculty team, and access to resources for faculty exchange made the extra efforts required of this endeavor worthwhile. To be sure, ASAN 491 is far from being a panacea for all the shortfalls and deficiencies of area studies. Inadequacies in theorization, reiteration of varying forms of Orientalism, and disjunctions between the ways the humanities and the social sciences contribute to a holistic understanding of places and people remain as challenges to the area studies project in general (cf. Anderson 1992). Yet the course’s direct connection between the people and places of study together with incorporation of the lived experience does represent an innovative step toward addressing some of these issues. The introduction of multiple voices that provide opportunities for collaborative learning departs from the more traditional approach of relying almost exclusively on readings and lectures still found in most classrooms (Abueva 1989, 34–36). Today’s undergraduate students have grown up in an era when flows of information and ideas are nearly as instantaneous as access to the Internet is ubiquitous. To the degree that instant messaging has for younger generations replaced “old school” e-mail, the decision to encourage real-time interaction has been critical for maintaining a degree of unpredictability and enthusiasm that undergraduates value. Rapid advances in technology suggest there may come a time in the not too distant future when the demand for video formats will present new options for organizing collaborative area studies.10 In the end, one of the best ways to measure the impact of an experimental course may be to see if students remember the learning experience a decade later. It is still too early to undertake such a review. Still, the feedback to date suggests ASAN 491 is at once a memorable experience, but even more importantly, a course that allows students to see two societies differently.

Notes 1.╇ See: http://www.Hawai‘i.edu/movingcultures/. 2.╇ This is not to conflate “local” with “Hawaiian,” forms of identity that are at once quite distinctive and at times overlapping.

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3.╇ Much has been made of the prospects for information and communication technology fundamentally transforming education. Distance education, for example, is proving to be a cost-effective means for Pacific island nations to reach some of their most isolated communities. The University of the South Pacific has made major investments in developing satellite technology for online courses and is a leader in this field, covering an area that takes in nearly one-third of the globe. Online learning is being embraced as well by more traditional educational institutions. Cornell University has established a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary called eCornell, an Internet learning company that advertises “Ivy League excellence, online convenience.” Topics or courses, termed “learning molecules,” are offered via a “production model” that is said to be at once flexible and learner-centered. Our collaborative endeavor was considerably more modest. 4.╇ The members included Dr. Willa Tanabe, dean of the school; Dr. Terence Wesley-Smith, project coordinator for the Moving Cultures initiative; Dr. Gerard Finin, deputy director of the East-West Center’s Pacific Islands Development Program and a specialist in Philippine Studies; and Dr. Ricardo D. Trimillos, chair of the Asian Studies Program and an ethnomusicologist with major fieldwork in the southern Philippine island of Sulu. 5.╇ A third ADZ faculty member, Homer Mabale, was initially involved in conceptualizing the endeavor, but his eventual appointment as a government attorney precluded his ongoing participation. 6.╇ We subsequently migrated to WebCT software that was adopted by UHM. 7.╇ An example of questions relative to loss of land is instructive: What are the social problems that arise from “landless” peoples in Mindanao and in Hawai‘i? For Hawai‘i, it is evident in the number of homeless (many of whom are Native Hawaiian) living in public parks or on public beaches. In Mindanao it is expressed by the struggles for ancestral lands and the determination of the T’boli to reoccupy their homeland. What are the various governments doing to address land issues and the social problems they generate? What do you see as other possible approaches or solutions? 8.╇ For example, on at least two occasions students have suggested meeting with groups in Mindanao that are well-known for kidnapping activities. 9.╇ The term “standard English” is not meant to denote technical rigidity or deny the importance of regional differences, but rather to suggest forms of English that are common to American university settings. 10.╇ Students’ desire for speed and excitement in cyberspace was balanced by scholarly readings and class discussions that required patience, sustained attention, and an understanding of complexities that are incomprehensible without extended periods of thought and reflection.

References Abinales, Patricio N. 1998. Images of State Power: Essays on Philippine Politics from the Margins. Diliman: University of the Philippines Press.

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Abueva, Jose V. 1989. “Internationalizing Higher Education: Values and Ethics.” Higher Education Policy 2 (3): 34–36. Anderson, Benedict R. 1992. “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States 1950–1990.” In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes, and Karl Hutterer, 25–40. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies. Emmerson, Donald K. 1984. “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s In a Name?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15:1–21. George, T.â•›J.â•›S. 1980. Revolt in Mindanao: The Rise of Islam in Philippine Politics. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford. Hirschman, Charles et al. 1992. Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies. Koppel, Bruce M. 1995. Refugees or Settlers? Area Studies, Development Studies, and the Future of Asian Studies. East-West Center Occasional Papers, Education and Training Series, No. 1. Majul, Cesar Adib. 1973. Muslims in the Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. McGregor, Daviana. 2002. “Ho‘i Ho‘i Ea Hawai‘i; Restoring Hawaiian Sovereignty.” In Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific, edited by Paul Spickard, Joanne Rondilla, and Debbie Hippolite Wright. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Osorio, Jonathan K. 2002. Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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Chapter 11

E-Learning and the Remaking of Pacific Studies An Evolutionary Tale Peter Hempenstall, Robert Nicole, and Terence Wesley-Smith

A truly new experience having to chat and exchange ideas and views about all of the issues raisedâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›challenging as well to one’s identity to rethinkâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›these issues and relate to other’s experiences. I guess learning is not equal to studying or training. It is greater than both. It is a cast of mind, a way of looking at things—harnessed by Oceania on the Move! â•… —Student comments, interactive module, fall 20021

This is a report on an experiment that originated in the Ford Foundation–

funded Moving Cultures project to remake Asia Pacific studies and evolved into the love child of a triangular relationship between institutions in the Pacific islands. The original idea was to try a new interactive teaching program across universities in the Pacific and Asia that would reconceptualize the meaning of “area studies” as it related to the Asia Pacific region. Moving Cultures set out to create an innovative pedagogy by using the Internet to link classrooms at the University of Hawai‘i with those at other regional universities. The curriculum would focus on the flows of capital, people, and ideas—the “moving cultures” connecting disparate parts of this vast region. One of the products was Oceania on the Move, a four-week interactive module bringing together students in Hawai‘i, Fiji, and New Zealand to consider the patterns of migration entangling the histories of the three island places. The module—which has been offered three times to date—has generally been favorably reviewed by students and in many respects has exceeded the expectations of its architects. It has also raised some profound issues con196

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cerning this type of student-centered pedagogy—especially one so heavily dependent on digital technology—and illustrated the challenges of building learning communities across significant cultural and institutional boundaries. If one day this experiment in interactive learning is judged significant, it will be because it has served, albeit in a small way, to address some of the imbalances of power, especially between Western academics and studied communities, that have characterized organized forms of Pacific area studies from the outset.

Pacific Studies in Flux The initial stages of the Moving Cultures project raised intellectual and logistical questions about the Pacific itself and its part in the conceptualization of area studies. Although the Pacific islands have been an important social laboratory for more than two hundred years, among the most studied regions on earth, the question of what we do when we “do” Pacific studies has always been somewhat of a puzzle. There is nothing self-evident about “the Pacific” as a geographical region or about the cultural or spatial entities that have come to represent its constituent parts (see chapter 3). As Greg Fry has demonstrated, the idea of the Pacific as a distinct region originated from the strategic interests of the Allied powers in the aftermath of World War II and became increasingly reified with the rise of Cold War concerns (Fry 1997). The organized study of the Pacific “area” emerged largely in response to these geopolitical imperatives, incorporating many of the same parameters and concerns (Wesley-Smith 1995, 117). This was a form of area studies that revolved around outsiders needing to know the insiders in the name of national interest, an imperative that has been played and replayed, with variations, until the present day. Despite, an “island centered” turn in the 1960s and 1970s and a concerted attempt by scholars to understand the region from the inside out, Pacific studies have remained a rough and inconsistent mixture of whatever disciplines are represented within the institution where they have been housed. These difficulties have been compounded by two other considerations. First, until recently, Pacific islanders remained underrepresented in the academy, particularly in key disciplines like anthropology and history. Indigenous voices were acknowledged in the arts, in literature, and theater and dance, but their contribution to the definition of regional cultures or an Oceanic approach to the study of the Pacific registered only fitfully in academic studies. Second is the vexing question of the connections between the white-settler-dominated societies on the rim of the Pacific, such as Australia

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and New Zealand, and the island societies that are their neighbors and clients in trade, aid, and migration relationships. These became the influential variables in modifying the Moving Cultures program to resonate with questions that were already being asked in different parts of the Pacific, in Fiji and New Zealand. At the University of Canterbury in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, Pacific historians were wrestling with the problem of how to engage a pakeha body of students—the Anglo-Celtic descendants of 150 years of European settler migration—with the values and cultures and historical experience of Pacific islanders.2 More than 200,000 Polynesians, predominantly from Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and the Cook Islands, have made New Zealand their homes, living alongside the Polynesian Maori indigenous community, who themselves constitute some 16 percent of the total population of four million (Crocombe 1999, 69). What did the study of “the Pacific” mean in the face of such mobility, paralleled in other settler colonies such as Fiji, where nearly half the population were the descendants of indentured workers brought from India to work the sugar plantations? Or north of the equator in another sugar colony, Hawai‘i, where the indigenous population had been heavily outnumbered by migrant workers, mainly from Asia, by the turn of the twentieth century? Pakeha students seemed strangely ignorant about the forces of historical and cultural change in the islands, even though New Zealand had been directly involved as a colonial power in the region since the early decades of the twentieth century.

Oceania on the Move The concerns of the Canterbury historians became known to the team at the University of Hawai‘i working to reform the field of Pacific area studies. The original idea was for the University of Hawai‘i and the University of the South Pacific in Fiji to develop a semester-long series of three interactive modules thematically focused on migration, tourism, and globalization, with Canterbury off to one side participating in one of the modules. Like Hawai‘i and Fiji, New Zealand represented a hybrid cultural site produced by flows of capital and people, and Canterbury offered a link to a Western-educated, Polynesian, and pakeha population of learners that could generate productive energy in testing a new interactive approach to Pacific studies. When the Fiji coup erupted in May 2000, right in the middle of planning, the team at the University of the South Pacific was forced to postpone its part in the experiment. Participants from Hawai‘i and Canterbury decided to proceed with a modified two-campus venture, a four-week interactive module covering the migration theme only. The module, called Oceania

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on the Move, was taught as part of Canterbury’s advanced level Pacific history course and a similar course in Pacific Islands Studies at University of Hawai‘i.3 The four-week module covered the migration experiences of multiethnic populations in Hawai‘i, Fiji, and New Zealand, including their origins in Asia, Europe, and the Pacific islands. Other themes included the nature of early labor exchanges; the composition of the present-day populations of the three societies, and the issues they face in living together; and the meanings of biculturalism and multiculturalism. In the second half of 2000, students at Hawai‘i and Canterbury studied together in a common four-week period, though the module occurred at different points in each course because of differing semester schedules. Following the same syllabus, each instructor used classroom meetings to deliver background information, review readings, discuss the issues, and prepare the students for their assignments. As well as posting group “position papers” on each week’s topic, students had to make individual responses to the literature and to interventions by other students. Subgroups of students on each campus used the Oceania on the Move website to interact with a previously selected cohort on the other campus and to complete these assignments. With a return to a relative sense of normality and security in Fiji, the University of the South Pacific rejoined the consortium for a repeat of the module in 2001. With its collaborating instructor on leave, Canterbury did not participate in a third version of Oceania on the Move offered in the fall semester of 2002. However, a second University of Hawai‘i class was recruited to allow a three-way, two-campus interaction.4 In reviewing this three-year experiment in redefining Pacific studies through interactive online learning, three dimensions have dominated debriefing discussions. These are the technical aspects surrounding the modular approach, the kind of learning made possible by this form of Internet education, and the potential power of such approaches to break through the discourses that have traditionally dominated area studies.

Technical Issues Serendipity has been a wonderful godparent to the Oceania on the Move project. In hindsight, the coup-induced reduction of a planned semesterlength collaboration to a single interactive module “clipped on” to conventional classroom courses looks like a stroke of genius. Incorporating a four-week module into established courses avoided many of the problems associated with meshing together entire educational systems, with their

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particular approaches to course approval, content, assessment and teaching/ learning styles. At the simplest level, it made it easier to find a common block of time for institutional partners located in widely separated time zones and following different semester schedules. It also minimized the potentially destabilizing effects of making students experiment with the Internet in a conventional classroom culture that expected them to perform through seminar discussions and standard research papers. The modular approach actually enhanced the face-to-face dialogue that is central to the educational process, because it involved learners and instructors in a new kind of partnership, one which encouraged both parties to practice new skills. From the instructors’ point of view, an important advantage of the modular approach to online teaching is that it allows different modules to be developed as integrated but limited contributions to a course of instruction. These can be clipped on and off as circumstances and personnel dictate, and even—in a more organized system of interuniversity cooperation— exchanged, bought, or sold to provide a pool of teaching/learning resources that is international, up-to-date, and interactive. There were also costs associated with the technical dimension of the module. One was the extra planning required of instructors in first two, then three widely separated places, and another was the management of what was a new frontier of learning for many students. What emerged from the process was the importance of a certain level of personal and professional compatibility between the collaborating instructors. Empathy for one another’s situations and a readiness to compromise proved necessary to get all the campuses to an agreed starting point and to make quick-fix adjustments when problems arose. This aspect of the collaboration was significantly enhanced by the periodic planning meetings between the participating instructors made possible by the availability of travel funds. There were also variations in baseline access to and familiarity with the technology that was necessary to run the module. Canterbury students had easy access to computers through extensive on-campus facilities, and dedicated computer laboratories were reserved for class work. However, student access to the Internet incurred fees that had to be paid for separately by the department offering the course. The University of the South Pacific provided free access to the Internet. But the unusually high enrollment figures the first year Oceania on the Move was offered, coupled with a lower university-wide ratio of computers per student, caused access difficulties from the outset. Eventually, a lab equipped with Internet connection was made available for one two-hour slot per week, and a small classroom facility was outfitted with computers financed from the Ford Foundation grant. While this dedicated

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space and technology could not provide for the entire class at any one time, it did ease much of the pressure on already stretched resources. More computers were purchased for the 2002 version of Oceania on the Move, but students on the Fiji campus still had to contend with oven-like conditions in the dedicated space caused by a faulty air conditioning system, as well as relatively slow download times during peak use periods. Not surprisingly, students at the University of Hawai‘i had the highest rates of technical literacy and the widest range of Internet options. Many were able to access the module website from personal computers at home. Unlike their counterparts in New Zealand or Fiji, some University of Hawai‘i students were already familiar with the Blackboard software package used to build and operate the Oceania on the Move website. As the instigator of the project, it was appropriate that the University of Hawai‘i host and maintain the course website, but this did make the other partners dependent on Hawai‘i for routine operations such as registering students on the site and setting up the working groups, as well as for technical advice when things went wrong. Another technical issue was the number of exercises that could reasonably be managed by students in a four-week module. Expectations did not appear to be radically different across the three Pacific universities. But the instructors had to take into account the variety of different tasks students performed during the course, allocate a percentage of the total assessment to module assignments, and bring their expectations into line with students’ overall work schedules. These calculations were different for each participating campus. In particular, high enrollments at the University of the South Pacific in 2001 multiplied the workload many times over and stretched quality control to levels where it could not be effectively guaranteed. As a result of experiences like this, the number of student exercises has been progressively reduced with each offering to allow a richer, deeper engagement with course materials.

Interactive Learning The second major question raised by the module is the kind of learning that can be achieved within a four-week module of virtual exchanges. There is too little time to allow spontaneous eruptions of debate and disagreement over the Internet to find their own, final resolution. Although many of the student postings were insightful and provocative, often the issues they raised were not taken far in subsequent cross-campus discussions. The task-driven goal of assessment, as well as competing on- and off-campus demands, may

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simply have restricted the time students were able to devote to the module. And even the most conscientious student would have had difficulty keeping up with the sheer volume of material appearing on the website each week. In some respects Oceania on the Move produced an embarrassment of riches that not all participants were able to fully enjoy. On the other hand, and as discussed further below, the relevance of the module’s content to students’ lives and their interaction with students from other cultural and institutional backgrounds were positive learning outcomes in themselves. As one University of the South Pacific student put it at the conclusion of the module, “I look backâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›after ‘canoeing’ through the course, and now have a more appreciative, accommodative and receptive gaze to things around [me].” Other participants described the interaction as “eye-opening” and “enriching,” and indicated how much they had learned from each other. One University of the South Pacific student from Solomon Islands concluded, “It really [was] a great experience for me and I’m privileged to share and learn from you people.” Discussion at the Remaking Asia Pacific Studies conference in December 2002 revealed that students can get caught in a “honeymoon” phase that too infrequently allows serious questions to be pursued to their logical research conclusions. Despite this, the honeymoon phase is not entirely wasted for students who come out of conventional degree programs that are not, in the student’s experience, as adventurous or as innovative as these interactive, international exchanges. Depth of analysis is achievable if the workload expectation is kept reasonably low and deeper shafts are dug into fewer fields of investigation; this implies a more directive, hands-on approach by the instructors. The short “clip-on”—four weeks, at most six weeks—is sufficient to jump-start a new kind of questioning and research assignment that shows students how to navigate their way to the solution to a problem. Instructors need not be overly anxious about changing students’ worldviews in one course or module. If participants are prodded to ask the right questions, indeed even the wrong questions, and if students are addressing significant historical, political, and ethical issues and acquiring the skill set to research these questions for themselves, then these are worthy outcomes in a lifelong process of learning. The performative nature of Internet learning and teaching is another issue that emerged from the Oceania on the Move experiment. Marsha Kinder has pointed out how we are all positioned within a series of narrative fields—as relatives in family sagas and as members of several communities performing within a cultural matrix. The process of teaching and learning is one of changing and being changed by narratives, in the interactive dialogue of reading,

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discussing, exchanging stories, and making judgments. Kinder demonstrates how we can take control of these narratives through strategies that fuse new interactive technologies with personal performance (Kinder 2003). In one sense, the online course or module is also a narrative field, capable of creating new stories about the community of inquirers and effecting change upon the stories of those caught up in it. That has been the experience with Oceania on the Move in each of its iterations, especially with the energy generated from the opening assignment. More than its architects expected, the exercise of swapping personal migration biographies of parents and grandparents and stories of places called “home” developed as an informal, opening exchange of genealogies, which enabled the participants to locate themselves both territorially and within the community of learners. It encouraged a “performance” of their identity in place and time, a very appropriate thing to do in the context of Pacific communities speaking to one another. But the online experiment also added another dimension: a sense, albeit limited, of “being there” in the Pacific, participating with other places and other cultures in the common goal of understanding the patterns of migration and identity that have produced the Pacific communities of today. As one student observed: The thought occurred to me that if each of us involved in this course were to make a chart of all the people and circumstances (intentional, coincidental, or just destiny) involved in delivering us to these classrooms in September 2002, we could, just amongst ourselves, assemble a chain of people, histories, cultures, and situations stretching around the planet and far back to the dawn of our species. This was a positive experience overall. The students were challenged to go beyond the conventional boundaries of the classroom, with its invitation to passive reception of knowledge, and develop their own performances, interacting with other campuses in other countries. Many website postings exhibited a depth of feeling rare in undergraduate assignments. One student from the Solomon Islands, for example, described his relationship with his home place in the strongest possible terms: To me my home is very important in my life. It is where I have my identity and culture. It is where nobody has any right over me.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›It is the place where I have rights to natural resources both on the land and in the sea. It is also where my great grandparents

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were buried, and we called it our history.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›My home is of significance to me because once I move away from it and (do) not claim it as my placeâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I have no identity. Another posting in the same series, but by a student born in Canada, was equally eloquent and intense. It also served to destabilize for the learning community any easy or polarized generalizations about indigenous and Western attitudes to place: There is no question in my mind that Corner Brook, Newfoundland is my home. It is the only place in the world that I feel I truly know and love. I know this when I am at home and feel as though every aspect of the world around is an extension of my own being. As I walk the trails I know every rock I pass, and every slight curve of the land as though it were my own body. As I walk down the streets I know every brick of every building and every shape of every mountain. I feel that every motion I make is in complete harmony with the environment around me. It is so hard to describe, but when I am there, I feel as though I have finally been placed back inside myself. I guess for me, when I am home there is no distinction between what is happening inside of my heart, my head and my environment. This connection might read strange if you remember that I left home by myself at 15 and have been moving around quite a bit. For most students, the new pedagogy enabled them to become active voices in an experiment to remake the field of study, in itself an unusual educational experience. Differences in performance styles showed up quite strikingly between the campuses. The University of Hawai‘i group and, in 2001, participants on the Fiji campus were much more diverse ethnically than those from bicultural Canterbury. Papua New Guineans, Solomon Islanders, Guamanians, Tuvaluans, Marshallese, ni-Vanuatu, and students with Hawaiian, Okinawan, Marshallese, Fijian, Tongan, and Samoan ancestry studded the participating classes. Though this sometimes skewed the exchanges among students, it also provided a dense array of cultural histories and communication styles to draw upon. Canterbury students in particular felt a strong sense of being re-educated about the ways other societies in the Pacific regarded their communal identities and communicated these to “outsiders.” The islanders for their part were encouraged to see pakeha and Maori as authentic partners in

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a wider Oceanic social and cultural framework, with different histories but similar migration stories to tell. University of Hawai‘i students initially found Canterbury postings more formal and academic than their own, a function of differences in social style and institutional practice. Canterbury made no apology for regarding this new medium of instruction as capable of engendering substantial intellectual energy in disciplined formats. At the same time, the encouragement by Hawai‘i students to articulate even half-formed ideas as a way of inviting a robust discussion was a lesson to Canterbury students in taking chances. Whether the range of discussions, swapping of personal stories, and chat sessions were closer to the sensibilities and modes of discourse of Pacific islanders remains to be debated, but it all made for rich, textual theater among the enlarged community of learners.

Issues of Empowerment Finally, the experience of participants at the University of the South Pacific gave a particularly intense sense of the intellectual and emotional challenges Internet cooperation can bring to conventional area studies. Academics and students at this regional university have a magnified impression of being on the margins of the Asia Pacific region’s geopolitics of knowledge.5 They share a view that powerful political/economic/cultural discourses circulating on the rim of the Pacific have effectively erased the intellectual energy at the center of island Oceania. In such discourses, islanders appear to occupy the empty hole in the regional doughnut. When their existence is acknowledged, islanders are assumed to produce cultures rather than knowledge and intellectual reflections. That Oceania is seen as a place to be studied rather than a place that generates important scholarship is indicated by the reality that few people outside the region know there is a University of the South Pacific. Worse still, they do not expect such an institution to exist. These discourses represent a considerable challenge to the university’s learning community and to the way it sees itself in local and regional configurations of knowledge. Compounding the problem are feelings of belittlement and inferiority that owe much to the residual effects of the region’s colonial history, as well as the processes of mental violence described by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks (Fanon 1967). One of the university’s intellectual leaders, Professor Epeli Hau‘ofa, argued in his path-breaking essay “Our Sea of Islands” (1993) that theories of modernization and dependency, such as those that have imbued the university’s courses in the last thirty years, have encouraged Pacific island students to view and understand the region

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in terms of smallness, isolation, and vulnerability. Hau‘ofa challenges these notions by proposing that liberation and empowerment necessitate a rethinking of Pacific people as living a dynamic existence in a large, interconnected sea of vibrant local and global Oceanic cultures. In this context, our project asked the question: How can subalternized institutions like the University of the South Pacific speak? Or more importantly, how can they be heard? As Walter Mignolo put it, silenced knowledges exist in locations where talking and writing take place but do not register in planetary systems of knowledge production (Mignolo 2000, 71). One way to acquire a greater and more receptive audience is to build strategic alliances. But how could the University of the South Pacific achieve this without giving up its cherished particularity as a regional university? That was the beauty of Oceania on the Move—the creation of a virtual learning community spread over multiple centers, but dominated by none. For the team in Fiji, the collaboration helped to break the notion of fringe and center and crossed the gulf that lies between “learning from” and “learning with.” This created a new, much larger geographical and conceptual space into which students could project their subjectivities and engage in dialogue with counterparts elsewhere. When students at the University of the South Pacific were posting their answers to weekly exercises on the electronic blackboard, they were not merely working to make the grade. They were also posting their presence as agents and as producers, not just of culture but of particular knowledges, ideas, and epistemologies that were valid, valued, and that warranted engagement. Even if their primary intention was just to pass the course, in effect they were breaking into unsettling, disturbing, and destabilizing dominant ways of seeing and knowing. Granted, not all students produced knowledge that held up to the rigorous scrutiny of their instructors and cross-campus peers. Even so, it was revealing and comforting to see that this problem was not confined to the University of the South Pacific. This afforded students in Fiji greater confidence in establishing personal and collective legitimacy and credibility as worthy members of the universal community of university students. For the University of the South Pacific, then, the Oceania on the Move collaboration was both empowering and transformative. It is interesting to note, however, that students at the University of Hawai‘i, arguably located closest of all the partner institutions to global centers of power and privilege, were not necessarily the most confident performers in this interactive drama. Indeed, a study based on in-depth interviews with Hawai‘i-based participants in the 2002 version of Oceania on the Move revealed that some students felt intimidated by the authority and sophistica-

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tion of the postings generated by their colleagues at the University of the South Pacific (McNaughton 2002, 3). Of course, these University of Hawai‘i students were hardly representative of mainstream America. Rather, they were an ethnically diverse cross-section of “local” students, some representing the first generation to enter higher education from disadvantaged educational backgrounds. The issue of silenced knowledges, it seems, might also have some relevance at the University of Hawai‘i.

E-Learning Institutional and cultural constraints remain and must be eliminated if this type of e-learning is to become an accepted part of the repertoire of educational delivery. The consumer mindset of students, often promoted by universities and colleges themselves in their relentless search for income, is the other face of e-learning that must be acknowledged. It is impossible to ignore a trend to vocational “training” that will maximize the chance of employment and an increasing need to share education with work needs to stay ahead of debt. Nor is there likely to be any immediate shift in the globalizing tendencies of the education market, with its encouragement of fast-tracking of qualifications through shorter and more intensive courses. All these forces lead students away from experimental courses, where they must become more active learners, into steadier, more predictable paths where the grades are attainable in transparent, familiar exercises. This student agenda must be respected; many students do not want to be the fodder in new pedagogical experiments when they have the job of getting the grades, getting the qualification, and finding a job. They retreat from exposing themselves to peer-to-peer learning, especially if an element of selfassessment is involved (Fischer 1998, 3). Even students well-disposed to new online initiatives can find the cyberspace encounter unsatisfying, for they miss the face-to-face performance in class discussions that allows them to read other students’ body language and to react confidently from that context. One must be cautious about claiming too much. Wesley-Smith points out how indigenous voices, vernacular knowledge, and ways of knowing—three important components of any pedagogy aimed at decolonizing a Westerndominated area studies—are not well-represented in either Pacific studies or cyberspace (Wesley-Smith 2003). Oceania on the Move did not redress that deficit in any substantial manner. But with its emphasis on interactivity and student-centered forms of knowledge production, the module did travel well beyond the “gift wrapping” often associated with the delivery of course materials to remote sites via the Internet.

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There is much still to be done to measure real progress. The problem of articulating interactive modules like Oceania on the Move with campus-based syllabi, and then connecting them into a common schedule that suits several institutions located in different hemispheres, has still to be overcome. Our experience suggests this is best done by individual negotiations on a small scale rather than through large strategic arrangements between institutions. Also, the deepening digital divide, manifested in this case by unequal access to Internet technology across the region, or at least the ease with which students can get to terminals in class and at home, will continue to determine the pace at which such virtual alliances can develop. More importantly, more work needs to be done on both the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of shifting ideas and systems of thought across cultural boundaries and different sorts of institutions. Associated with this is a suspicion—as yet untested—that such learning strategies are biased in favor of the good student with a high level of intellectual adaptability, rather than the run-of-the-mill participant. Regional learning communities are not built overnight, but will emerge in an evolutionary fashion. Our experience with several versions of Oceania on the Move confirms the considerable value of such communities in the face of the increasing inequities and uncertainties associated with a process of rapid globalization. It also suggests that modest initiatives like ours—that take advantage of some of the technologies at the heart of the globalization project itself—can provide students with a better understanding of shared regional histories and, hopefully, leave them better equipped to deal with issues of common concern.

Notes 1.╇ These comments were posted on the website of the 2002 version of the Oceania on the Move interactive module. To preserve confidentiality, nonparticipants are not able to access module websites, so no URL is provided here. For the same reason, the names of the students quoted later in this paper are not provided. 2.╇ The University of Canterbury was, in the 1980s, the first New Zealand university to offer a broad graduate master’s program in Pacific Studies through its Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies; in 1999 it also introduced an undergraduate major in Pacific history. 3.╇ The courses were History 363 The South Pacific: Reading Cultural Encounters, taught by Peter Hempenstall, and Pacific Islands Studies 491 The Contemporary Pacific, offered by Terence Wesley-Smith.

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4.╇ The new class was Ethnic Studies 301 Ethnic Identity, taught by Jonathan Okamura. 5.╇ The University of the South Pacific was established in 1968, and serves the tertiary educational needs of twelve island member countries.

References Crocombe, Ron. 1999. The South Pacific. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove. Fischer, Gerhard. 1998. “Creating the University of the 21st Century: Cultural Change and Risk Taking.” University of Colorado at Boulder, Center for Lifelong Learning and Design. Accessed at . Fry, Greg. 1997. “The South Pacific ‘Experiment’: Reflections on the Origins of Regional Identity.” The Journal of Pacific History 32 (2): 180–202. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. 1993. “Our Sea of Islands.” In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa, 2–16. Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific. Kinder, Marsha. 2003. “Honoring the Past and Creating the Future in Hyperspace: New Technologies and Cultural Specificity.” The Contemporary Pacific 15 (1): 93–115. McNaughton, Pam. 2002. “Understanding Oceania on the Move.” Unpublished research paper prepared for ANTH 317, University of Hawai‘i–West Oahu, Fall 2002. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. Wesley-Smith, Terence. 1995. “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies.” Pacific Studies 18 (2): 115–137. ———. 2003. “Net Gains? Pacific Studies in Cyberspace.” The Contemporary Pacific 15 (1): 117–136.

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Epilogue

Remaking Asia Pacific Studies Ricardo Trimillos

This epilogue is a commentary that provides a series of frames for the mate-

rial already presented by my colleagues. It considers ways in which their reflections and experiences, as well as mine, inform major issues of area studies and their pedagogies in the twenty-first century. I note that most of the foregoing chapters are collective in their presentation in that they are either co-authored or they present a synthesis of diverse sources and ideas. In contrast, my epilogue consists of an individual’s reflections and musings that claim space for the singular and an idiosyncratic voice in this volume.

Theorizingâ•—Area Studies Although the expressed object of the Ford Foundation’s 1997 Crossing Borders program was area studies writ large in United States tertiary institutions, our focus is more discrete—the Asia Pacific area. Thus our strategy has been to generate theories and approaches for area studies derived from a bounded entity formulated variously as “Asia Pacific,” “Asia-Pacific,” “Asian Pacific” or “Pacific Asia.” At the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) we are certainly invested in this entity, given the economic, political, and military past and present of this island archipelago. So for the larger vision of “remaking area studies,” we have drawn upon insights and experiences derived from our self-defined and bounded notion of area. We assume that these have sufficient value and relevance for understanding and “remaking” the broader field and a high degree of application in African Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Balkan Studies, to mention a few. What’s in a name? One provocative aspect is the definition of what constitutes a specific area: it can denote nation-states, unified geographical “places,” or spaces occupied by peoples related through culture or heritage. A second theoretical factor is agency; to what extent do we define our own 211

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area, to what extent do we allow or accept definition by others, and whose definition(s) are ultimately invoked and why? Because any definition of an area is constructed, the definition itself is instructive about the criteria and processes of decision making. Geographical proximity is frequently invoked as a criterion in the making of an area. For example, East Asia appears to be a tidy geographical triumvirate of nation-states, while Southeast Asia is less tidy. For many Asian Studies programs the East Asia region constitutes a major focus, if not the sole one. However, upon closer inspection, East Asia has fuzzy edges. Taiwan is a fascinating case. From an Asian Studies perspective, Taiwan is defined in relationship to the People’s Republic of China, that is, contested politically but uncontested in linguistic and economic terms. Further, its original inhabitants are ethnically and culturally related to the broad sweep of Austronesian peoples, a feature the Han majority acknowledges when convenient. Vietnam is sometimes included as a marginal part of East Asia, given its political and scholarly connections with dynastic China. In a final example of East Asian fuzziness, Okinawa re-emerges as an entity separate from Japan in current conversations on culture, social status, and ethnic identity. For post-1972 financial negotiations about U.S. military bases, however, Okinawa is subsumed into the greater Japanese body politic as a prefecture. In terms of how an area is labeled, perhaps there are certain entities that “always belong”— East Asia always includes the “core” nation-states of Japan, People’s Republic of China, and Korea. Even then, in most conversations, including those within United States academe, the term “Korea” by default references the current Republic of Korea. The more proper term “South Korea” is invoked infrequently, primarily when a contrast is needed during political or economic discussions with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea. Distinctions made with geographic markers such as “north” and “south” further reinforce my observation and Smith’s claim that geography is a major determinant in the construction of area (see chapter 2). After reading my colleagues’ contributions, I have come to the conclusion that there are “working definitions” and there are “workable definitions” for constructing an area. For me, working definitions denote functioning ones preferred and employed by the primary user group; workable definitions consist of alternative descriptors invoked for specific purposes or occasions. I explore both types of definitions, using the UHM organization of area studies as illustration. This exploration interrogates the dynamic and the rationales for both working and workable definitions.1 In Hawai‘i, cultures of the Pacific and of Asia have been juxtaposed primarily through three events of the twentieth century: the economic engine of

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the plantation industry, the political changes from sovereign state to territory and then statehood within the United States, and the military movements of the Pacific War. The local construction of Asia Pacific is heavily biased toward Polynesia in the Pacific and East/Southeast Asia in Asia. The naming of the School of Pacific Asia Studies at UHM is itself a promising site for theorizing (see below). But of immediate interest to me are the names of the specific area centers within the school and the categories they reflect. As of this writing the UHM centers consist of (in alphabetical order): China, Japan, Korea, Okinawa, Pacific islands, Philippines, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The areas identified, however, have not remained constant in the twenty-one-year history of the school. There have been deletions—Russia in Asia in 2002, Buddhist Studies in 2003, and Hawaiian Studies in 2007—and one addition—Okinawa in 2008. The present configuration shows that four areas correspond to specific nation-states (China, Japan, Korea, Philippines), three reference regional groupings (Pacific islands, South Asia, Southeast Asia) and one, the newest, identifies a subregion of a contemporary nation-state (Okinawa). The apparent inconsistencies militate against a systematic, hierarchical taxonomy with uniform criteria of contrast. Surely such consistency should be a fair expectation within a tertiary institution. However, in the specific locale of Hawai‘i, idiosyncratic categories reflected in the working definitions are useful to understanding our peculiar practice of area studies. The definitions are a response (not always synchronic) to a number of constituencies, including other campus units, resident heritage communities, the state as steward of a land-grant institution, federal and private funding sources, and the worldwide network of scholars. Clearly, there are underlying systematic elements within the local construction of area studies. For example, China, Japan, and Korea could form a regional grouping of East Asia, as mentioned previously. Yet they exist at UHM as separate structural units, due in major part to the specific scholarly and research configuration here, as well as the demographics of the resident community. Largely a function of a plantation past and a present tourist industry, East Asian populations in Hawai‘i maintain a strong ethnic awareness of being Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. The plantation experience has institutionalized this awareness and the tourist industry has commodified it. A tourist slogan some decades ago proclaimed, “Visit Asia without a passport; come to Hawai‘i!” The specificity of nation-state cum ethnicity is a major impetus for donors of all kinds. Local heritage communities have been extraordinarily generous to the Korea and Japan programs. In addition, the governments of the relevant nation-states have provided major financial support; the Japan

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Foundation was the first with a major endowment in 1973 to the Center for Japanese Studies, followed by the Korea Foundation in 1991 to the Center for Korean Studies, and most recently the Confucius Institute in 2006 to the Center for Chinese Studies. Donors, both private individuals/foundations and governments, consider specific nation-state identity as critical; to the Japanese government, supporting Japanese Studies seems more appropriate than donations to an amorphous East Asian entity (see Carlile’s account of Japan’s evolving funding policies in chapter 4). A second factor is the specialization of area studies faculty throughout the university, which tends to develop research topics particular to a single nation-state. The time and effort required for competence in an East Asian language sufficient to conduct research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences encourage a single nation-state focus. Not all area designations are established for the same reasons. The Philippines as an area studies program based on a nation-state exists in direct response to political pressure from the growing and increasingly vocal ethnic Filipino population in Hawai‘i. The center was founded upon a desire for validation of Filipino identity rather than as an instrument for external funding. In contrast to heritage populations from East Asia, the resident Filipino population at present does not command major economic resources or an established tradition of public philanthropy. There is no immediate financial rationale for a separate identity, and the Philippine government is not in a position to fund area studies programs overseas. The political rationale was also the impetus for the recent founding and funding of the Center for Okinawan Studies. Community and university constituencies mounted a major lobbying initiative among state legislators of Okinawan heritage. Unlike the Filipino population, the local Okinawan community possesses both financial capacity and a tradition of philanthropy, which bodes well for the development of an Okinawan Studies program separate from Japan Studies. Although it has no nation-state counterpart, Okinawan Studies receives support from the national government of Japan and from the prefecture government of Okinawa. This is an unusual if not unique instance of regional homeland support, and suggests a new development for an area studies paradigm. I have pointed out that the working definitions at UHM illustrate a range of levels of specificity and represent diverse impetuses for program establishment and maintenance. A cursory survey of other United States area studies centers focused on Asia indicates that Hawai‘i is unique in that it defines as an area both Southeast Asia and the Philippines, as well as both Japan and Okinawa. This particular place-based construction of area studies has its own sensibility within the Hawai‘i milieu.

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However effective in this insular context, area studies at UHM also interacts with entities beyond the islands, for which its working definitions may not be appropriate or understandable. For such circumstances Hawai‘i invokes a workable definition, which more often than not represents an accommodation to an outside agency or organization. The most important workable definition for UHM is that developed by the United States Department of Education through its National Resources Center (NRC) program. To access federal funds, Hawai‘i uses the NRC’s definition of area studies, which consists of East Asia (subsuming the UHM-designated China, Japan, Korea, and Okinawa areas) and Southeast Asia (subsuming the UHM-designated Philippines and Southeast Asia areas).2 The federal government mandates the foregoing definitions of area studies, and the University of Hawai‘i accommodates the mandate for its obvious benefits. In another example of the influence of an NRC workable definition, the Pacific islands NRC grant does not fund the study of ethnic Hawaiian culture and language, although Hawaiian culture and language is certainly part of the Pacific and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies has produced a number of graduates who focused on Hawaiian topics. The NRC workable definition cannot include an ethnic Hawaiian component because the agency funds only “foreign” languages and area studies. Other workable definitions for area studies involve the naming of the UHM school itself. It was established in 1987 as the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies (SHAPS). In this formulation the three components constituted a loose federation of locally relevant area studies programs with a limited amount of interaction among them. In 2007 the Hawaiian Studies component separated to form its own school. The two remaining units were renamed the School of Pacific and Asian Studies. I find the new name to be signal and laden with potential for remaking area studies. First, it inverts the title order, placing Pacific before Asia. Second, with only two components and the absence of intervening punctuation, the notion of a unitary area becomes a possibility. With the new school “brand,” it is possible that the previous federation model of SHAPS could be remade, establishing a unitary gaze on a Pacific Asia region as single entity. The broader issues contained in relationships between Asia and the Pacific in fact have been re-enacted in the remade UHM School of Pacific and Asian Studies. In chapter 6, Teaiwa problematizes those relationships from a Pacific islander point of view. Her assertion that there is an asymmetrical relationship between the two regions disrupts my vision of a unitary gaze. Teaiwa’s concerns about the asymmetries of power, resources, and global recognition are candid and convincing. Even if Pacific islands scholars were to recognize

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benefits from an association with Asian Studies, few Asian Studies specialists consider such an association beneficial; there is a potential disconnect between UHM area studies as structure and as practice. Certainly a remaking of area studies in Hawai‘i acknowledges that the Pacific and Asia are already in economic, political, and military interaction with one another. The circulation of labor and goods between Asia and the Pacific is part of a colonial and Pacific War past; it is certainly part of a globalized and industrialized present. Examples include a long-standing and ongoing Chinese mercantile presence in the Pacific, South Indian labor brought to Fiji by the British, Filipinos exiled to Guam by the Spanish during European colonization, Japanese adventurism in Micronesia and Melanesia prior to and during the Pacific War, and the movement of labor from Asia to the Pacific to enable Asian-owned manufacturing and tourist industries today. The remaking of area studies to consider Pacific Asia as a unitary area still remains to be achieved. Noticeably, no single project in the Ford Foundation– funded Moving Cultures initiative established linkages involving both Pacific islands, other than Hawai‘i, and Asian institutions.3 The projects followed the SHAPS “federation” model. The Pacific islands group worked with Pacific islands institutions (Canterbury University in Aotearoa New Zealand and the University of the South Pacific in Fiji), while the Asian Studies colleagues paired with Asian colleagues (Ateneo de Zamboanga University of the Philippines, National University of Singapore, and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University of Japan4). For most U.S. institutions, including UHM, it is a challenge to address established infrastructures that may prevent the full realization of program and pedagogical goals for remaking the field. Carlile points out that in Japan the nomenclature differentiates area studies and international studies, so a Japan-centric construction of Asian Studies might include itself within the purview of study. In contrast, Asian Studies in the United States or the United Kingdom would be positioned for the most part externally to the defined area of study. Hawai‘i and Aotearoa New Zealand present less clear-cut cases: the positionality may not be completely external, further supporting my contention that a working definition is idiosyncratic while a workable definition is not. As we contemplate Dirlik’s description of emerging and competing paradigms for area studies (chapter 1), we turn to another issue for the academic community: agency. Who decides which paradigm or paradigms are going to be used? Do we as academics construct the alternative paradigms from what we know, or do we acquiesce to external agents such as governments or globalized economies and the paradigms they create? Teaiwa suggests that the paradigm is subject to external forces and pressures that influence and

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sometimes dictate trajectories and priorities. Eades recognizes a “dialectic of intellectual concerns and the state of the market” (chapter 5). Carlile is optimistic about a definition of area studies in Japan that is not burdened by the institutional baggage peculiar to United States institutions (chapter 4). The implication is that some remakings of area studies will occur beyond the American purview. From these observations, I suggest that global diversity in area studies is a future (if not already a present) inevitability.

Performing Pedagogy As an educator I have been delighted with the Moving Cultures initiative because it addresses epistemology and pedagogy simultaneously. Discussion and reflection on ways to transmit knowledge is an ongoing concern in United States academe and is certainly not unique to area studies. However, a notable part of my experience with the initiative is the extensive and focused attention from area studies colleagues on issues of pedagogy and knowledge delivery. These constitute an applied or practical aspect of area studies, a component that deserves attention from more specialists. During the course of the project, pedagogy was both theorized and treated empirically through a number of interinstitutional and cross-national classroom experiments, four of which make up the previous section of this volume. In designing pedagogies for the UHM initiative, there were some a priori conditions for all projects. The first was their nature as cross-national and therefore presumably their interaction as cross-cultural. Internet technology as a principal medium of communication for the project was the second condition. It enabled real-time chat and video conferencing as well as asynchronous activities, including online discussions and the posting of assignments and readings. Reconciling different semester calendars was the third condition, and organizing the course around windows of scheduling congruence was a challenge and sometimes a problem. These three conditions provided a common structure around which each class could be organized. Not a priori but nevertheless part of a common structure was the foregrounding of student-centered learning strategies—in contrast to teachingcentered ones—throughout the initiative. All participants seemed to agree that a student-centered learning approach has advantages for cross-cultural education, although there had been no collective discussion or formal consensus. First, it provides a space for the lived experience of both the student and the teacher. The cross-institutional, cross-cultural projects reported here valorized heritage, as well as the dynamics of synchronous and asynchronous interactions as lived experience. Second, it provides or (in some student

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cases) enables a forum for diverse voices, so that the learning experience reenacts the field’s shift from a dominant paradigm to alternative and competing paradigms as described by Dirlik (chapter 1). The shift from a dominant, professorial voice to a diversity of voices with different degrees of perceived authority will be discussed later. As noted, the choice of student-centered learning seems to have been arrived at independently by each faculty team; it was not a precondition. It might be useful to consider possible reasons for the choice: (1) as a reaction against more traditional teaching-based methodologies, (2) as an opportunity to try something new, or (3) as a response to the desire to employ a pedagogy with a better “fit” for delivery of the content. Examining individual motivation(s) for employing a particular teaching philosophy should be part of the process of determining appropriate delivery systems. It is particularly appropriate given arguments for the place-based nature of area studies. For the course involving the Philippines with which I was involved, the motivation for selecting a learning as opposed to a teaching focus was the nature of the material as well as the educational goals we identified for the class (chapter 10). But I do not advocate it as a complete replacement for teaching-based approaches. Both approaches are useful and should continue to constitute viable pedagogical choices. The various instructional experiments selected different formats: An exercise within a pre-existing class (Singapore/Hawai‘i Tourism, Singapore/ Hawai‘i Chinatown); a module within a pre-existing class (Aotearoa New Zealand/Fiji/Hawai‘i); and an independent full-semester course created for the project (Philippines/Hawai‘i). Critical to the development and value of any pedagogy is the time available, and two aspects of time informed the effectiveness of each instructional initiative: time allotted within the course for the project and time made available by institutions to allow for more than one iteration. The exercise and the module formats nested each project within an established course; four weeks were allotted for each project. The shorter time for a project and its integration into an established and ongoing course prompted student perceptions that it was an “extra” or “added on” component. This perception was in contrast to the full-semester format, which put the class on an equal standing with other course offerings; it was neither extra nor an add-on. The students regarded the semester class as a regular course for which the international exchange represented an innovative and attractive feature. As such this class did not experience the “honeymoon phase” reported for other projects. Because of the departure of a team member on sabbatical, the two projects with Singapore were presented only once, so there was no time to revise

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the format, to establish a track record, or to assess long-term effectiveness. The module involving Aotearoa New Zealand and Fiji was offered three times, albeit with a different configuration of partners for each iteration. The repetitions allowed evaluation followed by adjustments to the pedagogy and the course content. It provided a baseline for assessment over three years. The pedagogical effectiveness and successes of the full-semester format for the Philippines project seems to argue for a longer time period as desirable for collaborative projects. This class has continued to be offered, well after the completion of the UHM initiative in 2002. It represents the single instance of an experimental project permanently integrated into a UHM curriculum, here in Asian Studies. As those reporting on the Pacific island module observed, “regional learning communities are not built overnightâ•›.â•›.â•›.â•›[they] emerge in an evolutionary fashion” (chapter 11). In this case the evolution is now in its seventh year and continuing. Each of the formats privilege student-centered learning, which allows and encourages student empowerment, responsibility, and buy-in to the educational project. As an instrument for developing independent thinking and student maturity, the pedagogy appears successful, as the case studies indicate. It is also identified as a means for encouraging personal reflection. As themes of positionality and agency enter the discourse of area studies, an awareness of these issues should be considered a desirable pedagogical goal. Although I am optimistic about learning-centered approaches, I do have questions about their effectiveness for some educational domains. For example, not evident or addressed in the four case studies is the efficiency of the pedagogy for mastering specific knowledge or for raising levels of critical thinking. These questions remain open and show the need for more discussion about the pedagogy of area studies. Such explorations might allow us to be more articulate and convincing about the role of area studies within an undergraduate liberal arts education, and about “the production of local knowledges” in the case of graduate training. Another factor in the success and long-term value of such projects is the commitment of the individual faculty member and his or her ability to secure further institutional support. Both ends of the spectrum concerning faculty commitment were encountered in the Hawai‘i initiative. In the project with Aotearoa New Zealand the original faculty colleague moved to an administrative position and his replacement did not share the same interest in the project; the collaboration was not continued. In contrast, the Philippines project shows a seven-year commitment by the same faculty “team,” which has established a course with a strong reputation on both campuses. Each year it is fully subscribed. The project has successfully secured infrastructural

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support from both institutions. For example, short-term faculty exchanges between the schools continue to enrich the learning experience for both students and teachers on the two campuses. As Kong points out, there are challenges as well as rewards for engaging in such projects. Not only does the individual faculty member steward the initiative, he or she must often negotiate the tensions that arise from competing or conflicting inter- and intrainstitutional agendas. Stewardship by individual faculty members is critical for collaborative pedagogies. A final observation about pedagogy concerns faculty development. An educational approach based upon student learning and cross-institutional collaboration forces us as faculty members to rethink the ways we organize and present courses. We must commit to a different orientation for planning and for classroom delivery, one that requires frequent and regular consultation as well as consensus. Such a mode for planning stands in contrast to our usual solitary (often after midnight) mode of course organization. Planning alone is both convenient and ego-validating: all decisions on teaching strategy, content, and learning outcomes are unilateral and uncontested, at least at the planning stage. In contrast, the processes of consultation and consensus with colleagues inevitably engender unanticipated time obligations and constraints as well as personal inconvenience. Collaborative pedagogy requires a rethinking of faculty roles and status for the delivery of knowledge. The trope of academic freedom may functionally empower the teacher as the single authoritative voice in a classroom setting, but the presence of and interaction with second, third, or fourth authoritative voices of collaborating colleagues change the perceived role of the individual teacher for both faculty members and students. The pedagogy under consideration here carries risks for the individual faculty member as well as implications for faculty development, both of which should be weighed before undertaking any such project. However, I would argue that the risks are more than compensated for by the benefits, which include a different kind of credibility that accrues to the instructor. For faculty collaborators, the pedagogy involves the same kinds of international and intercultural interactions programmed for the students. All participants, teacher and student alike, personally engage with Eades’ “performance of area studies” (chapter 5). This symmetry is a positive feature not lost upon the students. I have attempted to present pedagogical issues using broad strokes and a personal voice that nevertheless has wider applications and implications. Our self-reflection concerning pedagogies appropriate to our field are important contributions to the rethinking and repositioning of area studies within the

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academy. More attention should be given to this aspect of our work. The interrogation of pedagogy points to ways in which remaking area studies is both necessary and desirable. Finally, what we decide as appropriate pedagogies in area studies can fuel ongoing discussions about teaching and learning, with the potential for remaking and reshaping other fields as well as our own.

Lessons Learned In the two foregoing sections, I presented one discussion focused on area studies as a field, and a second on practical issues of pedagogy. Both derive in large part from the writings and discussions concerning UHM’s Moving Cultures initiative. To conclude the epilogue, I present in brevis an array of lessons I think we have learned through engaging the initiative. They are deliberately brief, encouraging readers to “fill in the blanks.” As in the foregoing sections, I view the particulars of our initiative as illustrative of and instructive for area studies in a global context.





1. More than one author has characterized area studies as amoebic in nature, contracting and expanding to accommodate a particular interest, grouping of societies, or imagined heritages. All area studies systems of categorization are constructed; the criteria and processes of construction tell us something about definition making. 2. Interinstitutional interdependence will increasingly become the primary modality of area studies scholarship. It is clear that no single institution can support expertise and resources in all the areas it considers within its area studies domain. In almost all cases an institution’s reach is greater than its grasp. A challenge will be to develop an area studies ethos that privileges the production of knowledge over institutional reputation. 3. Cyber technology offers both challenges and rewards for interinstitutional and intercultural modes of learning. Cyber communication has spawned a distinctive culture with its own protocols and orthoÂ�gÂ� raphies. We most readily contrast “cyber speak” with older oral and written cultures of communication within a society. Experiences from our initiative suggests an additional layer of complexity: each locale develops a cyber culture which not only contrasts with its existing oral and print culture, but also contrasts with cyber cultures generated in other locales. Interinstitutional and international exchanges reify such levels of complexity for the students.

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4. The importance of individual agency for innovating or remaking area studies cannot be emphasized enough. The case studies illustrate how key individuals determined the successes, both unqualified and limited, of each project. 5. Pedagogies focused on learning rather than teaching evidence a high degree of relevance for area studies. Although consensus indicates general satisfaction with this choice, we should identify which educational goals the approach serves well and consider the prioritization of those goals. Learning-based pedagogy has received much attention in American educational circles of late. The ways we develop it for our field may carry potential benefit beyond it. 6. Outcomes intended by the instructor are not always the outcomes experienced by the student. Still, the relative successes and failures of a project are determined in part by the ability to realistically plan outcomes, and multiple iterations of a project enabled ways of learning from experience and adapting methods of delivery and interaction to the benefit of the project as a whole. In any construction of pedagogy, both inductive and deductive processes should come into play. 7. The UHM initiative enabled a platform for diverse voices, so that the learning experience re-enacts the field’s shift from a dominant paradigm to alternative and competing paradigms. The shift in the pedagogical realm re-enacts the shift Dirlik posits for area studies as a field. The issues of empowerment discussed were not only about the student, but also about faculty and the collaborating institutions. The specter of asymmetrical power relationships appears at all levels of the initiative. 8. We must be constantly vigilant of established infrastructures and “usual” ways of thinking on our transformative vision for area studies. For example, the Chinatown project with Singapore (chapter 9) actually generated essentialized stereotypes rather than working against them. Although in theory pedagogies should critique stereotyping, in practice the pedagogy may default to them. More importantly, a predisposition for essentialization may be imbedded in an institutional culture. The facile stereotype can exist at a structural level, even with the best of intentions. For example, Kong’s descriptive contrast between Singaporean students as “hard-working” and Hawaiian students as “more relaxed” is both essentialist and judgmental (chapter 7). Mental images of Hawaiian students lounging under palm trees while Singaporean students occupy their study carrels are problematic if not counterproductive to the goals of exchange.

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The degree to which the entire Moving Cultures initiative, including this volume, provides impetus for change and development in the field remains to be seen. Certainly changes to institutional infrastructure would be evidence of its effectiveness and of the efficacy of its lessons. I hold the initiative to be of major significance. It has set a stage for remaking area studies, not only for us from the participating institutions but also for the wider field. How area studies programs undertake the remaking—or whether they in fact choose to—depends in large part on lessons learned.

Notes 1.╇ I trust my Hawai‘i colleagues understand the positive intent of the exercise and acknowledge its value for this discussion. 2.╇ The NRC also has a South Asia category, but UHM does not compete in this area. 3.╇ Although in Stage I of the initiative, UHM Pacific Islands Studies and Asian Studies faculty members worked together with colleagues at Palau Community College on a research and teaching project. 4.╇ Not reported upon in the section “Asia Pacific Learning Communities,” although the faculty participants, Carlile and Eades, are represented in the section “Critical Perspectives.”

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About the Contributors

CONRADO BALATBAT is associate professor at Ateneo de Zamboanga University in Mindanao, where he teaches in the Religious Studies Department. He was educated at Ateneo de Zamboanga University, Ateneo de Manila University, and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He is a former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and has been a visiting professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. LONNY E. CARLILE is associate professor in the Center for Japanese Studies and the Asian Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research interests include the political economy of Japan, especially labor politics, aging, and the overseas travel industry. His recent publications include “Rediscovering Enterprise Unions in Post–World War II Japanese Labor History” (Labor History, 2008); “From Outbound to Inbound: Japan’s International Travel and Tourism Promotion Policy Rationales” (in The Impact of Globalization on Japan’s Public Policy, Mellen, 2008); and Divisions of Labor: Globality, Ideology, and War in the Shaping of the Japanese Labor Movement (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). T.â•›C.â•›Chang is an associate professor in geography at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His interests are in urban redevelopment, tourism in Southeast Asia, arts and architecture, and geographic pedagogy. He is the coeditor of Interconnected Worlds: Tourism in Southeast Asia (Pergamon, 2001) and Asia on Tour: Exploring the Rise of Asian Tourism (Routledge, 2008). He received his PhD from McGill University in 1997. Hezekiah A. Concepcion is former chair of the Social Science Department and former dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Ateneo de Zamboanga 225

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University. He teaches Philippine and U.S. history courses. He received his MA in history from Ateneo de Manila University (1995), and was a U.S. Information Agency grantee to the Summer Institute in History at Boston College in 1996. His research interests include the history of the Moros of Mindanao, and U.S. civil-military relations. He has been a co-coordinator of the Ateneo–University of Hawai‘i online class program since 2001. Arif Dirlik is professor of Chinese Studies and honorary director of the CUHK–Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Asia Pacific Centre for Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, concurrent professor, Center for the Study of Marxist Social Theory, Nanjing University, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow, The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. His recent publications include Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Paradigm Publishers, 2007), and the edited volumes Pedagogies of the Global (Paradigm Publishers, 2006) and Snapshots of Intellectual Life in the People’s Republic of China (special issue of boundary 2, 2008). JEREMY EADES is professor of Asia Pacific Studies and director of the Media Resource Center at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan. Trained as an anthropologist, his recent work has focused on cultural and economic change in East and Southeast Asia, and his publications include The ‘Big Bang’ in Japanese Higher Education (coedited, Trans Pacific Press, 2005); The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia (coedited, Berghahn Books, 2004); and Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan (coedited, Trans Pacific Press, 2000). Gerard finin is senior fellow and deputy director of the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu and an adjunct professor at the University of Hawai‘i and the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. He holds a PhD in urban and regional planning and Southeast Asian Studies from Cornell University, and his research interests include governance, nation building, globalization, and the dynamics of social change in small island states. His recent publications include The Making of the Igorot (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2005), a 2006 Manila Critics Circle finalist for Best Book in the Social Sciences. He is coeditor of the Pacific Islands Policy monograph series. Jon goss is professor of geography and director of the Honors Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is a former director of the Interna-

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tional Cultural Studies Program, a joint venture of the East-West Center and University of Hawai‘i. He holds graduate degrees from Oxford University and the University of Kentucky, and his research interests focus on urban geography, landscapes of popular culture and tourism, social theory, and Southeast Asia. His recent publications include articles and book chapters on tourist landscapes, the geography of consumption and commodification, and he coedited (with Ming-Bao Yue) “De-Americanizing the Global” (special issue of Comparative American Studies, 2005). PETER HEMPENSTALL has recently retired as professor in history and director of the Honours Programme at the University of Canterbury. He also codirected the New Zealand–Australia Connections Research Centre and the Anzac Neighbours research project. His research interests have focused on patterns of colonial rule in the Pacific, especially the German empire in the early twentieth century, and his recent publications have included (with Paula Mochida) The Lost Man: Wilhelm Solf in German History (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), and (with Brij Lal), “Pacific Lives, Pacific Places” (Journal of Pacific History, 2001). Lily Kong is a social and cultural geographer whose research interests span the study of religion, music, creative economies, place histories, and the social construction of identities. She has published widely on these topics, and her most recent publications include Singapore Hawker Centres (National Environment Agency, 2007); The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of ‘Nation’ (Syracuse University Press, 2003); and Landscapes: Ways of Imagining the World (Pearson, 2003). She is a professor at the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, where she is also vice president (university and global relations) and director of the Asia Research Institute. Lisa Law is a senior lecturer in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at James Cook University. She is author of Sex Work in Southeast Asia: The Place of Desire in a Time of HIV/AIDS (Routledge, 2000) and coeditor of a special issue of Urban Studies on “Contested Landscapes, Asian Cities” (2002). Her research focuses on the politics of sexual and national identities, especially in the context of intra-Asian migration. She is currently writing about expatriate life in Singapore, where she lived and worked before arriving in the United Kingdom. Martin W. Lewis is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University, where he teaches global historical geography, contemporary

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geopolitics, and the history of Southeast Asia. A geographer by training, his research focuses on the history of geographical ideas, especially those pertaining to the division of the world. He is the author of Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital, and Environmental Degradation in the Cordillera of Northern Luzon, 1900–1986 (University of California Press, 1992), and the coauthor (with Karen Wigen) of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (University of California Press, 1997). He is also the coauthor of a collegelevel textbook on world geography titled Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (3rd Edition, Prentice Hall, 2006). ROBERT NICOLE is a senior advisor with the Ministry of Pacific Islands Affairs in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was formerly a research scholar at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury, and he taught for many years at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. His research interests include Pacific history, pedagogy, and literature, and he is the author of The Word, the Pen, and the Pistol: Literature and Power in Tahiti (State University of New York Press, 2001). Neil Smith is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and former director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. He books include American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (University of California Press, 2003; Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, 2004); The Endgame of Globalization (Routledge, 2005); New Urban Frontier (Routledge, 1996); and Uneven Development (3rd edition, Blackwell, 2008). His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and he is an organizer of the International Critical Geography Group. TERESIA K. TEAIWA is senior lecturer in Pacific Studies, Va‘aomanu Pasifika, Victoria University of Wellington. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Hawai‘i and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and taught politics at the University of the South Pacific before moving to Wellington. Her research interests include the gendered dynamics of militarism in the Pacific, and the theory, practice, and pedagogy of Pacific Studies. Her recent publications include numerous articles, book chapters, short stories, and poems. She coedited New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations (Victoria University Press, 2005) and Turning the Tide: Towards a Pacific Solution to Aid Conditionality (Greenpeace Australia Pacific, 2002).

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RICARDO TRIMILLOS is professor and chair of Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He holds degrees from San Jose State College, the University of Hawai‘i, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and his research and teaching focus on music and Filipino folk Catholicism, the expressive culture of the Tausug of Sulu, gender and identity in the performing arts of Asia, and the arts and public policy. His recent work has appeared in the Journal of American Folklore and as chapters in books. He coedited Taking Risks in Safe Spaces, Playing Safe in Risky Places (Center for International Performance, UCLA, 2004). CHRISTINEâ•—R.â•›YANO is professor of anthropology at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she focuses on Japan, Japanese Americans, and popular culture. Her forthcoming book is Airborne Dreams: Race, Gender, Class, and Globalism in Postwar America (Duke University Press). She has also published on Japanese American beauty pageants and Japanese popular music. TERENCE WESLEY-SMITH is associate professor and graduate chair in the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. A political scientist with degrees from Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Hawai‘i, he is editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs. He directed the Ford Foundation–funded Moving Cultures research and teaching initiative at the University of Hawai‘i from 1997 to 2002. His recent journal articles have addressed conceptual issues associated with self-determination and “failed states” in Oceania, and he is coeditor (with Edgar Porter) of China in Oceania: Toward a New Regional Order? (Berghahn Books, forthcoming).

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Index

Adas, Michael, 10 ADZ. See Ateneo de Zamboanga African Studies, 35, 79 agency, 211–212, 216–217, 222 Akashi Yasushi, 86 American Anthropological Association, 96 Anderson, Benedict, xiii Anderson, T., 148, 158, 175 anthropology: in Japan, 73, 79; library resources, 96; in Pacific region, 116–117; relationships between researchers and researched, 112–113 Aotearoa New Zealand. See New Zealand; University of Canterbury APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation), 19, 95 Appadurai, Arjun, ix, xvi, xvii, xxiv, 37 APRU. See Association of Pacific Rim Universities APU. See Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University area definitions: agency in, 211–212; for Asian studies, 50; for Asia Pacific studies, 35–36, 51, 94–96,

99, 211–217; challenges from globalization, x; constructed, 221; oceans, 15–17, 19, 53; for Pacific Studies, 114, 197; political factors, 35–36; practical considerations, 96–99; regionalization, 59–60; social processes as basis, 20, 29; static, xii; variability, 95–96; working and workable, 212, 215. See also global division area studies: agency in, 216–217, 222; alternative approaches, 10–19, 38–39; changes, xvi–xvii; contemporary trends, 9; crisis, ix, xiii–xv, 1, 7–9, 42; critiques of, 8, 9, 42; decolonization, 207; future of, 223; globalization and, ix–x, xv, xvi, 5–6; history of, x–xiii, 7, 24; importance, 18; interdisciplinary, xii, 116; knowledge organization, 39; mission, xv; nation-states as unit of study, xi–xii, 8; pedagogy, 219–221; in postwar period, x–xi, 35, 38, 50, 76–79; remaking, 211, 215–216; research agenda,

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xvi–xvii; theoretical influences in other fields, xiii; in United States, x–xiii, 7, 24, 76; before World War II, 72–76. See also Asia Pacific Studies; Japan, area studies in area studies programs: contributions, 8; developing, 92; funding sources, xi, xiii, xiv–xv, 42; government funding, 38; national security links, xv, 38, 76 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), 56–57, 95 Asia: Central, 50; diversity, 49; Maritime, 50–51; rise of, 14; South, 50, 57–58; as spatial and cultural category, 49–51; vagueness of term, 41. See also East Asia; Southeast Asia Asian Americans: Filipino Americans, 179–180, 186, 188, 189, 190, 214; in Hawai‘i, 213; popular perceptions of, 50; of South Asian heritage, 50, 57–58 Asian Pacific Americans, 19 Asian Studies: approaches, 6–7, 8–9; Asianization, 14–15, 19; in Australia, 14; boundaries of region, 50; funding sources, xiv; U.S. dominance, 14. See also Asia Pacific Studies; University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Asian Studies 491 (ASAN 491). See Mindanao-Hawai‘i course Asian Studies in Asia Network, 14 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 19, 95 Asia Pacific region: core, 95, 99; definitions, 35–36, 51, 94–96, 211–217; extended definition, 95, 99; regional identities, 56–58; relations between Asia and Pacific, 20, 119, 215–216; terms

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used, 6, 51, 95, 211; textbooks, 94–95; use of term, 6, 20, 51 Asia Pacific Studies: cultural studies, 99, 102; future of, 105–107; issues, 99–102; library resources, 96–99, 104; political economy tradition, 99; practical considerations, 96–99. See also area studies; Asian Studies; Pacific Studies Asia Pacific University. See Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Association for Asian Studies, 50 Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), 128 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 56–57, 95 Ateneo de Zamboanga (ADZ), 178, 180, 185, 216. See also Mindanao-Hawai‘i course Atlantic Ocean, 53, 56 Australia: Asian studies in, 14; included in Asia Pacific region, 51; migration to, 54 Australian National University: Asian Studies in Asia Network, 14; language studies, 127–128; Pacific Studies, 113 Balatbat, Conrado, 180–181, 191 Bednarz, R.â•›S., 146 Bentley, Jerry H., 16, 54 Bitterli, Hans, 16 Blackboard software, 104, 149, 159, 182, 201, 206 borderless classrooms. See virtual classrooms Braudel, Fernand, 16, 53 British Empire, 32 Broome, P., 148 Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, xv–xvi

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Index

Canterbury, University of. See University of Canterbury Cartier, Carolyn, 16 Castells, Manuel, 37 Central Asia, 50 Chang, T.â•›C., 152 Chaudhuri, K.â•›N., 16 China: Confucius Institute, 214; publishing industry, 97. See also East Asia China studies, 81, 213, 214 Chinatown class project (NUSUHM), 164–176; aims, 165–166; assignments, 167–173; challenges, 175; course evaluations, 175–176; description, 164; mutual othering problem, 173–176; outcomes, 176; stereotypes exposed, 166, 170, 174–175, 176, 222 Chinatowns, comparing Honolulu and Singapore, 164–165, 167–173 Chinese diaspora, 17, 100 Christianity: in Kerala, India, 58; in Mindanao, 188–189 cities: growth, 101; “mirror,” 54; power, 25–26, 34; scale, 30–31 city-states, 32 civilizations: compared to continents, 47–48; conflicts, 10–11, 20, 43–47, 60n2; Confucian, 10, 43, 46; discourse, 19, 42–47; Islamic, 10, 43; Western, xi–xii, 43, 44–47, 48, 60n1 climate change, 101 Clio World Bibliography, 96–97 Cold War: area studies during, x–xi, 35, 87; end of, xiii, 5, 57, 86 collaboration, institutional: benefits, 139; forms, 126–129; in future, 139; with governments, 128–129, 133, 134–135; with

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industry, 129; networks, 128; personal relationships, 130–131, 136–137; policy issues, 133–135, 137–138; political issues, 131– 133; success factors, 129–135 collaboration, interuniversity: benefits, 105–106; courses, 105–106; financial considerations, 134; in future, 106–107, 221; institutional support, 219; joint/ double degree programs, 127; language studies, 127–128; by National University of Singapore, 129, 131–132, 135–139; policy issues, 133–134, 137–138; by Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, 104, 216; student exchanges, 126, 132–133, 134, 138; study abroad programs, 126–127, 132; summer programs, 126–127, 132. See also Moving Cultures collaborative learning: advantages, 147–148; in face-to-face classrooms, 147–148, 160–161; Moving Cultures projects, xviii–xx, 217–220; outcomes, 147–148, 157; phases of student interaction, 155; roles of teacher, 147; student unwillingness to experiment, 207; trust in, 145, 166 collaborative teaching: benefits, 136, 183, 219, 220; challenges, 135, 137, 142–144, 146, 166, 183, 217; costs, 134; in future, 138–139; institutional support, 219; NUS-UHM projects, 135–139; success factors, 136–138, 144–145, 219; technology, 134, 142, 144, 146, 149, 161. See also Moving Cultures; virtual classrooms

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colonialism: end of, 5; in Hawai‘i, 187; Japanese, 75–76, 119; knowledge forms, 11; local area knowledge production, 75; in Philippines, 181; post-, xiv, xvii, 6, 21n1 communication. See interaction analysis model; languages; technology Concepcion, Hezekiah, 180–181, 191 Confucian civilization, 10, 43, 46 Confucius Institute, 214 Connery, Christopher L., 16 continents, 47–49, 59 Cornell University, 194n3 Critical Asian Studies, xvi critical theory, xiv Crossing Borders initiative, xxv n3, 7, 18, 211 cultural analysis, 166 cultural conflicts, 20, 166, 174–175 cultural constructionism, 112–113 cultural studies, xiv, 6, 99, 102 cultures: academic, 166, 174–175, 205, 222; cyber, 221; relationship to geography, xii; stereotypes, 166, 170, 174–175, 222. See also multiculturalism culture shock, 150 Cumings, Bruce, xi, xv decolonization, xi, 99. See also colonialism decolonization of academy, 115, 117, 207 Dening, Greg, 112, 117 dependency theory, xxiv n1 Descartes, René, 27 diasporas, 17–18, 19, 100. See also migration Diaz, Vicente M., 120 distance education, 194n3. See also virtual classrooms

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Doyle, Randall, 55 Duke University, “Oceans Connect” project, xxv n3, 15 Eagleton, Terry, 28 East Asia: countries included, 212, 215; use of term, 6, 50 East Asia Association, 75–76 East Asian Studies, 84, 213–214 Einstein, Albert, 27 e-learning. See virtual classrooms Emberson-Bain, ‘Atu, 118 empowerment: decolonization of academy, 115, 117, 207; geographical scale and, 31; of students, 183, 186, 190, 205–207, 219 environmental issues, 101, 102 epistemology, ix, xiv, xvii, 144, 217. See also knowledge ethnic identities, 184, 187. See also multiculturalism ethnocentrism, 115 Ethnogeographical Board, 50 Europe: continental status, 48–49; division into Western and Eastern, 50; multiculturalism, 44 faculty members: of area studies programs, xii; benefits of collaborative teaching projects, 136, 137–138; development, 220; exchanges, 183, 220; performance incentives, 138; roles in virtual classrooms, 184, 219; service on government committees, 128–129. See also pedagogy Fanon, Frantz, 205 field trips. See virtual field trips Fiji: coups, 117, 198; descendants of indentured laborers, 198. See also University of the South Pacific

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Index

Filipino Americans, 179–180, 186, 188, 189, 190, 214 Finin, Gerard, 180–181, 191 Ford Foundation: Crossing Borders initiative, xxv n3, 7, 18, 211; funding of area studies programs, xiii, 7, 14, 42, 78–79; grant to University of the South Pacific, 200. See also Moving Cultures Foucault, Michel, xiv foundations, funding of area studies programs, xi, xiii, 42, 84, 213– 214. See also Ford Foundation Frost, Ellen L., 50–51 Fry, Greg, 197 Fukuyama, Francis, ix Geertz, Clifford, xiii geographical determinism, 43 geography: continents, 47–49; “end of,” 28–29; metageographical schemes, 41–42, 47, 51, 59; oceans, 51–53; process, 37, 53, 165, 166, 176–177; relationship to culture, xii; scale, 25, 30–35, 37–38, 59; scholarship, 24, 28; “trait,” 165, 166, 170. See also Chinatown class project; global division; space Giuliani, Rudolph, 34 global division: continents, 47–49, 59; First, Second, and Third Worlds, 25; as intellectual constructs, 59–60; oceans, 51–53; regions, 50. See also area definitions; civilizations globalization: declining importance of borders, 28, 29; impact on area studies, ix–x, xv, xvi, 5–6; neoliberal view, xiii; scale, 31; trends, 24–25 “glocal” term, 34 Gordon, Stewart, 50

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governments: collaboration with educational institutions, 128–129, 133, 134–135; funding of area studies programs, xi, xiv, 38, 84, 87, 213–214 Greece, ancient, 48 Gunawardena, L., 148, 158, 175 Hall, Ivan P., 74 Hanson, Victor David, 45–46, 48, 60n3 Harootunian, H.â•›D., xiv–xv, 42 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 12–13, 16, 19, 114, 117, 205–206 Hawai‘i: colonial history, 187; educational culture, 154; Filipino heritage population, 179–180, 186, 188, 214; homeless people, 194n7; Honolulu’s Chinatown, 164–165, 167–173; labor imported, 187–188, 198, 212–213; multiethnic population, 153, 174, 188, 199, 212–213; Native Hawaiians, 178, 184, 187; tourism promotion, 156, 170 Hawaiian Creole English, 178, 190–191 Hawaiian Studies, 213, 215 Hegel, G.â•›W.â•›F., 27, 49 Hereford Map, 48 Hereniko, Vilsoni, 11, 12, 113 higher education: in Japan, 72–73, 74, 77, 84–85, 86–87, 92–93; in Philippines, 189. See also area studies; collaboration, interuniversity; faculty members Hobson, John M., 47 Hokkaido University Slavic Research Center, 78 Honolulu, Chinatown, 164–165, 167–173 Howe, Kerry, 112, 117

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Huntington, Samuel P., 10, 11, 42–43, 44 Hussein, Saddam, 44 identities: ethnic, 184, 187; local, 184, 191; national, 57, 184, 187; regional, 56–58 “Identity, Self-determination, and Conflict in the Asia Pacific Region: Mindanao and Hawai‘i.” See Mindanao-Hawai‘i course identity politics, 35 imperialism, xi, 32. See also colonialism India: Kerala, 58; migration from, 100, 198; Punjab, 58 Indian Americans, 57–58 Indian Ocean, 52, 53, 58 indigenizing agendas, 115–116 indigenous peoples: empowerment, 113; identities, 184; knowledge, xvii, 11–12; Native Hawaiians, 178, 184, 187; of Philippines, 188; ways of knowing, 116–117 indigenous studies, xvii, 11–13, 19, 112–113, 115 Institute of Developing Economies (Japan), 79 Institute of Oriental Studies (Japan), 77–78 institutional collaboration. See collaboration, institutional interaction analysis model, 148, 158, 175 interactive modules: advantages, 199–200; “clipped on” to courses, 199–200, 202; future of, 208; Oceania on the Move, 196–207; time span, 160, 218, 219; workload expectations, 201, 202. See also virtual classrooms

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14–15 international studies programs: competition with area studies programs, xiii–xiv, 83–84; in Japan, 71–72, 80–81, 82, 83–84, 216; in United States, 79–80 Internet: culture of, 221; students’ access, 200, 208. See also virtual classrooms internships, 129 Islam: civilization, 10, 43; in Philippines, 178, 184, 188–189; political, 10 islands, in Atlantic, 56. See also Pacific Island states Itoh Akihiro, 86–87 Japan: colonies, 75–76, 119; foreign policy, 79, 86, 89; foreign students in, 84–85, 93–94; funding of Japan Studies in other countries, xiv; higher education system, 72–73, 74, 77, 84–85, 86–87, 92–93; international organizations and, 86; international studies, 71–72, 80–81, 82, 83–84; Ministry of Education, 77, 87, 94, 103; Ministry of Trade and Industry, 79; modernization, 72, 73–74, 77, 100; Okinawa, 212, 213, 214; promotion of Japan Studies in other countries, 84, 214; publishing industry, 97, 105; students studying abroad, 85, 87; U.S. occupation, 77; in World War II, 56, 76. See also East Asia Japan, area studies in: associations, 75–76, 77; changes since end of Cold War, 86–89; course offerings, 81–84; definition, 71;

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Index

distinction from international studies, 71–72, 216; faculty expertise, 83; foundation support, 78–79; future of, 89–90, 105–107; government support, 84, 87; institutions, 74–79, 103; internationalization drive, 81–85, 93; new approaches, 88–89; number of programs, 87, 88; post-World War II, 76–79; study of China, 81; study of Japan, 73; before World War II, 72–76. See also Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Japan Center for Area Studies, 87 Japan Foundation, 84, 213–214 Johnson, D.â•›W., 148 Johnson, R.â•›T., 148 Kahn, Herman, 10 Kant, Immanuel, 27 Kaplan, Martha, xi Keesing, Roger, 112–113 Kelly, John, xi Kinder, Marsha, 202–203 knowledge: in area studies, 35–39; colonial production, 75; construction of, 147; delivery, 220; epistemology, ix, xiv, xvii, 144, 217; of indigenous peoples, xvii, 11–12 Kobayashi, Audrey, 118, 120 Korea: funding of Korea Studies in other countries, xiv, 214; Japanese colonial government, 75; as part of East Asia, 212. See also East Asia Korea Foundation, 214 Krauthammer, Charles, x Kreutz, William H., 180 Kuwayama, Takami, 105 Kyoto University, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 78–79

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labor migration: in Asia Pacific region, 20; to Fiji, 198; to Hawai‘i, 187–188, 198 languages: creoles and pidgin, 178, 189–191; cyber-, 189, 221 language studies: in Asia Pacific studies, 106; benefits, 8; collaborative, 127–128; in Japan, 74–75, 80; less commonly taught languages, xiv, 127–128 Latin America, countries included in Asia Pacific region, 51, 55 Latin American Studies, 35 learning: in face-to-face classrooms, 147–148, 160–161; interaction analysis model, 148, 158, 175; in virtual classrooms, 158–160, 161, 202–203, 207–208. See also collaborative learning; pedagogy Lefebvre, Henri, 27–28, 29, 30–35 Leibniz, Gottfried, 27 Lentini, Pete, 51 library resources, 96–99, 104 Linnekin, Jocelyn, 112–113 Lowe, C., 148, 158, 175 Ludden, David, xii, xiii, xiv Mabale, Homer, 194n5 Mahbubani, Kishore, 47, 50 Maori people, 198, 204–205 Maritime Asia, 51 Marxism, 9 McDougall, Derek, 51 McMillen, Heather, 150–152, 160 Mediterranean studies, 16, 53, 56 Melanesia, 51. See also Pacific Island states Mendler, J., 148 metageographical schemes, 41–42, 47, 51, 59 Micronesia, 51, 52, 75. See also Pacific Island states Middle East studies, xiv, 35, 38

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Mignolo, Walter, 206 migration: diasporas, 17–18, 19, 100; to Hawai‘i, 212–213; labor, 20, 187–188, 198; to New Zealand, 198; in Pacific region, 20, 54, 100; “settler” populations, 178; study of, 100–101, 184. See also Oceania on the Move module Mindanao, Philippines: Christians, 188–189; events in, 185; homeless people, 194n7; Muslim minority, 178, 184, 188–189; stereotypes of, 188. See also Ateneo de Zamboanga Mindanao-Hawai‘i course (ADZUHM), 178–193; assignments, 185; challenges, 183, 184, 186–187; content, 182; course evaluations, 192, 193; current events and, 185; Filipino American students, 186, 188, 189, 190; instructors, 180–181, 183, 184, 191; languages used, 186, 189–191; learning outcomes, 187–191, 193; objectives, 178; planning, 179–181; reasons for project, 179–180; stereotypes exposed, 187, 188; structure, 182–183, 219; student empowerment, 183, 186, 190; student exchanges, 182, 183, 186, 191; students, 186–189; success factors, 181, 193; technology used, 179, 182–183, 184, 185, 192; themes, 184 Mitchell, B., 148 Miyoshi, Masao, xiv–xv, 42 modernism, xii, 5, 11 modernization theory, xxiv n1, 5, 8 Mols, Manfred, 51 Moran, Louise, 130, 131, 134 Moving Cultures: Remaking AsiaPacific Studies: Chinatown

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project, 164–176; collaborative projects, 127, 135–138, 196, 216; conference, xx; description, 141; goals, xvii–xviii, 196; lessons, 139, 221–223; Mindanao-Hawai‘i course, 178–193; Oceania on the Move module, 196–207; Palau research project, xviii; pedagogical issues, 217; regional learning communities, xviii–xx; student perceptions of class modules, 143; technology used, 217; tourism project, 149–158 Mugridge, Ian, 130, 131, 134 multiculturalism: in Hawai‘i, 153, 174, 188, 199, 212–213; in New Zealand, 199; in Singapore, 151–152, 156; in United States, 18 multilateral institutions, xi mutual othering, 173–176 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 84 Nanyō Gakuin, 76 narrative fields, 202–203 National Geographic, 28 national identities, 57, 184, 187 nationalism, 115, 117 National Museum of Ethnology (Japan), 79, 87 National Resources Center (NRC) program, 215 national security, area studies programs and, xv, 38, 76 National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 14 National University of Singapore (NUS): collaboration with U.S. institutions, 129, 131–132, 135–139; collaborative teaching projects with UHM, 135–139, 216; faculty members, 128, 136,

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Index

137–138; joint/double degree programs, 127; students, 136, 166. See also Chinatown class project; tourism class project nation-states: books published on individual, 96–99; borders, 33; effects of globalization, 33; persistence, ix–x; power, 38; relationships to other units, 25–26, 37–38; scale, 31–33; as unit of study, xi–xii, 8 Native Hawaiians, 178, 184, 187 Native Studies, 115. See also indigenous studies NCBV. See NUS College in Bio Valley NCSV. See NUS College in Silicon Valley neoliberalism, xiii, xxi Newton, Isaac, 27 New Zealand: descendants of European settlers, 198; included in Asia Pacific region, 51; Maori population, 198, 204–205; multiethnic population, 199; Pacific Studies programs, 113; Polynesian minority, 198. See also University of Canterbury Northeast Asia, 96 North Korea, 212 NRC. See National Resources Center NUS. See National University of Singapore NUS College in Bio Valley (NCBV), 129, 132 NUS College in Silicon Valley (NCSV), 129, 132 Oceania on the Move module, 196–207, 216; assignments, 203; community created, 206; costs, 200; first offering, 199; instructors’ roles, 200; lessons learned, 201–205; outcomes,

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196–197, 202, 219; plans, 198–199, 200, 201; student discussions, 201, 202, 203–204; student empowerment, 205–207; technical issues, 199–201; website, 199, 202 oceanic studies, 15–17, 19, 53 oceans and seas: Atlantic, 53, 56; as geographic units, 51–53; Indian, 52, 53, 58; maps of, 52; Mediterranean, 16, 53, 56; as regions of study, 15–17, 19, 53–56. See also Pacific Ocean “Oceans Connect” project, Duke University, xxv n3, 15 Ogata Sadako, 86 Okinawa, 212 Okinawa studies program, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 213, 214 online learning. See Internet; virtual classrooms Orientalism: in area studies, 5, 8, 120; Marxist critique of, 9; in student discourse, 169–170, 172, 173, 174 Orientalism (Said), xiv, 174 otherness, xii, 72, 153, 173–176, 182. See also stereotypes Pacific Asia: cultural similarities among countries, 99–100; use of term, 6, 51, 95. See also Asia Pacific Pacific Islanders: students, 203–204, 205–206; underrepresentation in academy, 197, 205 Pacific Islander Studies, 111 Pacific Island states: ignored in Asia Pacific studies, 51, 55; research in, 113; scholarship on, 55–56, 112, 115, 197 Pacific Island Studies. See Pacific Studies

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Pacific Ocean: names, 52; as region of study, 15–17, 53–56; size, 53–54 Pacific region: cultural conflicts, 20; cultural exchanges, 54; definitions of, 111, 114, 197; diversity, 112; migrations, 54 Pacific Rim: concept, 6, 11, 16, 19, 55, 197–198; economic ties, 54 Pacific Studies: approaches, 111; Asia Pacific Studies and, 118–120; associations, 114; boundaries, 111–118; comparative analysis, 117–118; definition of region, 111, 197; interdisciplinary, 116; issues, 197–198; journals, 114; rationales, 115; scholarship on specific islands, 55–56, 112, 115, 197; size of field, 110, 111, 119; university programs, 113, 116, 118, 121n7, 208n2, 213 Pakistani Americans, 57–58 Palau, Republic of, Moving Cultures research project, xviii Peattie, Mark R., 75 pedagogy: of area studies, 219–221; constructivist theories, 147; in virtual classrooms, 158–160, 219–221. See also collaborative teaching Philippines: area studies programs on, 180, 213, 214; colonial history, 181; creole languages, 178, 189, 190–191; Filipino Americans, 179–180, 186, 188, 189, 190, 214; higher education system, 189; Islamic movements, 184; languages, 181, 189, 190; national identity, 187; Sulu, 180, 181; Tausug ethnic group, 180, 181, 184. See also Ateneo de Zamboanga; Mindanao Polynesia, 51. See also Pacific Island states

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Polynesians, in New Zealand, 198 Polynesian Society, 114 postcolonialism, xiv, xvii, 6, 21n1 postmodernism, xiv, 28, 43, 116 process geographies, 37, 53, 165, 166, 176–177 Punjabi culture, 58 Reclus, Élisée, 52 Reed, M., 148 regional identities, 56–58 regional learning communities: in future, 208; Moving Cultures projects, xviii–xx, 217–220. See also virtual classrooms regions. See areas relativity theory, 27 Remaking Asia Pacific Studies. See Moving Cultures Research Committee on Comprehensive Approaches for the Promotion of Area Studies (Japan), 88 Rich, D.â•›C., 146 Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU): area studies program, 92, 103–105; boundaries of Asia Pacific region, 94–96; collaborative teaching projects with UHM, 216; curriculum, 103–104; faculty, 94, 104; foreign students, 94, 103; graduate programs, 103; languages of instruction, 94; library resources, 104 Robertson, Roland, ix Robinson, G., 146 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 33 Russian and East European Studies, 35, 78 Said, Edward, xiv, 115, 174 Salter, C., 149

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Index

School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies (SHAPS), University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, xvi, 215. See also University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Pacific Asia Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 213–216 Science Council of Japan, 87 Scott, James C., xiii SEAL. See Small Enrolment Asian Languages project seas. See Mediterranean studies; oceans and seas September 11 terrorist attacks, 10, 38, 43, 185 SHAPS. See School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies Simon, D., 148 Singapore: Chinatown, 164–165, 167–173; Chinese ethnicity, 151–152, 166; educational culture, 154; multiculturalism, 151–152, 156; tourism promotion, 152, 155–156, 170. See also National University of Singapore Slatter, Claire, 118 Small Enrolment Asian Languages (SEAL) project, 127–128 social flows, 25, 26, 27–28, 29, 37 Social Science Research Council, xiii, 42 software. See Blackboard software; technology; virtual classrooms Solomon Islands, students, 202, 203–204 Sophia University International Relations Institute (Japan), 80 South Asia, 50, 57–58, 213. See also India Southeast Asia: countries included, 215; regional identity, 56–57; use of term, 6, 50, 96, 212

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Southeast Asian Studies, 78–79, 213 South Korea. See Korea South Sea, 52 South Seas Association, 75, 76 space: absolute, 26–27; area knowledge and, 35–39; differentiation patterns, 25; production of, 26–30, 39; scale, 30–35, 36; social processes and, 29. See also global division spaces of flows, 37 Stainfield, J., 148 Stanford University, 129, 132 stereotypes: cultural, 166, 170, 174–175, 222; held by students, 166, 170, 174–175, 176, 187, 188; of students, 222 student-centered learning. See collaborative learning student empowerment, 183, 186, 190, 205–207, 219 student exchanges, 126, 132–133, 134, 138, 182, 183, 186, 191 study abroad programs, 85, 87, 126–127, 132 summer programs, 126–127, 132 supra-national institutions, 25, 33, 37–38 Swyngedouw, Erik, 37–38 Tagalog language, 181, 189, 190 Taglish language, 189, 190 Taiwan: funding of Asian studies programs, xiv; Japanese colonial government, 75; National Tsing Hua University, 14; as part of East Asia, 212 Takushoku Daigaku, 75–76 Tanabe, Willa, 135–136 teaching collaborations. See collaborative teaching; virtual classrooms

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Index

technology: access to, 200–201, 208; asynchronous, 141, 142–143, 151, 158–159, 184, 217; Blackboard software, 104, 149, 159, 182, 201, 206; chat sessions, 159, 160–161, 182–183, 184, 185, 189–191, 192; for collaborative teaching, 134, 142, 144, 146, 149, 161; constraints, 161; costs, 134; diffusion, 46; indigenous, 46; synchronous interaction, 159. See also Internet; virtual classrooms Third World, 9, 21n1, 25, 29–30 Tokyo University Institute of Oriental Studies, 75 Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Tōkyō Gaikokugo Daigaku), 74–75, 79 tourism: environmental issues, 102; in Hawai‘i, 156, 170; in Singapore, 152, 155–156, 170 tourism class project (NUSUHM), 149–158; assignments, 155–156; challenges, 146, 154–155; classes involved, 149; collaboration across borders, 150–154; instructor’s perspective, 158–159; lessons, 152–153; stereotypes exposed, 154; student perspectives, 150–153; student ratios, 154–155; technical issues, 159; technology used, 149 Toynbee, Arnold, 44 trafficking, human, 100, 101 “trait” geographies, 165, 166, 170 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 112–113 Trimillos, Ricardo, 180–181, 191 UHM. See University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa United Nations, 86

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United States: Asian Americans, 50, 57–58; Asian Pacific Americans, 19; colonial rule of Philippines, 181; ethnic groups, 18; foreign students, 85, 132–133; government funding of area and language studies, 38, 84; imperialism, 28–29; international studies programs, 79–80; Pacific Studies programs, 113, 213; promotion of American Studies in other countries, 84; war on terror, xv, 38, 45 United States Department of Education, 215 Universitas 21, 128, 138 University of Canterbury: computer and Internet access, 200; ethnic diversity of students, 204; Pacific Studies program, 208n2; pakeha students, 198, 204–205. See also Oceania on the Move module University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM): area studies organization, 212, 213–216; collaborative projects, 127; computer and Internet access, 201; ethnic diversity of students, 204–205; Hawaiian Studies, 213, 215; Okinawan studies, 213, 214; Pacific Studies, 113, 213, 215; Philippine studies, 180, 213, 214; School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies, xvi, 215; School of Pacific Asia Studies, 213–216. See also Moving Cultures University of Pennsylvania, 132 University of Sydney, 127–128 University of the South Pacific: benefits of collaborative teaching projects, 206; computer and Internet access, 200–201; distance education, 194n3;

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Index

establishment, 209n5; ethnic diversity of students, 204; student empowerment, 205–207. See also Oceania on the Move module urban areas. See cities Vanuatu, foreign research moratorium, 113 VFTs. See virtual field trips Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), 116 Vicziany, Marika, 51 Vietnam, 79, 212 virtual classrooms: academic calendars and schedules, 183, 199, 200, 217; challenges, 148, 183, 186; chat sessions, 159, 160–161, 182–183, 184, 185, 189–191, 192; as communities, 206; compared to face-to-face learning, 160–161, 185; cultural differences, 154; future of, 176–177, 193, 207–208; idealized images, 146; implications for teaching and learning, 158–160, 161, 219–221; instructor’s perspective, 158–159, 184, 185, 191; interactive modules, 199–200, 202, 208; languages

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used, 189–191, 221; limitations, 158–160, 166–167; performances, 202–203; potential of, 146, 193; student empowerment, 183, 186, 190, 205–207, 219; technical issues, 159, 161, 200–201; technology used, 184; university programs, 194n3. See also Moving Cultures; technology virtual field trips (VFTs), 148–149, 166–167 Volkman, Toby Alice, xvii–xviii VUW. See Victoria University of Wellington Waseda University, 94, 103 websites. See Blackboard software; Internet; technology; virtual classrooms Wendt, Albert, 117 Wesley-Smith, Terence, 114–116, 120, 207 Western civilization, xi–xii, 43, 44–47, 48, 60n1 Wilson, Woodrow, 33 Wright-Neville, David, 51 Zakaria, Fareed, 43 Zamboanga University. See Ateneo de Zamboanga

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Production Notes for Wesley-Smith & Goss / Remaking Area Studies Interior designed by University of Hawai‘i Press Production Staff with text in Galliard and display in Gill Sans. Composition by Lucille C. Aono Printing and binding by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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pacific studies/asian studies { Continued from front flap }

and

E duc ation s an d T he i r P u r p o s e s

goss

a c o n v e r s a t i o n a m o n g c u lt u r e s Edited by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock 2008, 488 pages cloth: isbn

978-0-8248-3160-8

Published in association with the East-West Philosophers Conference Education is the point of departure for the cultivation of human culture in all of its different forms. Although there are many contested conceptions of what is meant by a good education, there are few people who would challenge the premise that education is a good thing in which we should heavily invest. In this volume, representatives of different cultures and with alternative conceptions of human realization explore themes at the intersection of a changing world, the values we would choose to promote and embody, and the ways in which we educate the next generation.

Glob alization an d H i g h e r E d u c at i o n Edited by Jaishree K. Odin and Peter T. Manicas cloth: isbn

978-0-8248-2782-3; paper: isbn 978-0-8248-2826-4

Post-secondary education is a massive globalizing industry with a potential for growth that cannot be overestimated. By 2010 there will be 100 million people in the world, all fully qualified to proceed from secondary to tertiary education, but there will be no room left on any campus. A distinguished panel of scholars and educational administrators from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific was asked to speak on the complexities of globalized higher education from their positions of concern and expertise and then engage in a dialogue. The result is this timely and important work. Jacket design: Julie Matsuo-Chun

terence wesley-smith

is professor of geography and director of the Honors Program at the University of Hawai‘i. jon goss

ISBN 978-0-8248-3321-3

UNIVERSITY of HAWAI‘I PRESS Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888

90000

9 780824 833213 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

REMAKING AREA STUDIES

is associate professor and graduate chair at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i.

of related interest

TEACHING AND LEARNING ACROSS ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

To incorporateÂ�critical perspectives from the “areas studied,” chapters examine the development of area studies programs in Japan and the Pacific Islands. Not surprisingly, given the lessons learned from critical examinations of area studies in the U.S., there are competing, state, institutional, and intellectual perspectives involved in each of these contexts that need to be taken into account before embarking on interactive and collaborative area studies across Pacific Asia. Finally, area studies practitioners reflect on their experiences developing and teaching interactive, web-based courses linking classrooms in six universities located in Hawai‘i, Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, New Zealand, and Fiji. These collaborative on-line teaching and learning initiatives were designed specifically to address some of the conceptual and theoretical concerns associated with the production and dissemination of contemporary area studies knowledge. Multiauthored chapters draw useful lessons for international collaborative learning in an era of globalization, both in terms of their successes and occasional failures. Uniquely combining theoretical, institutional, and practical perspectives across the Asia Pacific region, Remaking Area Studies contributes to a rethinking and reinvigorating of regional approaches to knowledge formation in higher education.

wesley smith

REMAKING AREA STUDIES TEACHING AND LEARNING ACROSS ASIA AND THE PACIFIC 









edited by

Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss

This collection identifies the challenges facing area studies as an organized intellectual project in this era of globalization, focusing in particular on conceptual issues and implications for pedagogical practice in Asia and the Pacific. The crisis in area studies is widely acknowledged; various prescriptions for solutions have been forthcoming, but few have also pursued practical applications of critical ideas for both teachers and students. Remaking Area Studies not only makes the case for more culturally sensitive and empowering forms of area studies, but indicates how these ideas can be translated into effective student-centered learning practices through the establishment of interactive regional learning communities.� This pathbreaking work features original contributions from leading theorists of globalization and critics of area studies as practiced in the U.S. Essays in the first part of the book problematize the accepted categories of traditional area-making practices.�Taken together, they provide an alternative conceptual framework for area studies that informs the subsequent contributions on pedagogical practices. { Continued on back flap }