ASIAN STUDIES: THE STATE OF THE ART IN THE UNITED STATES

By David K. Wyatt 

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF ASIAN STUDIES
Our subject is a large one, not readily susceptible to brief summary. One
virtue of this enforced brevity, however, is that it requires reducing the
subject to essentials, and I hope that this brief overview might stimulate
thought and discussion concerning issues that now and in the future must
concern us. The state of Asian Studies in the United States mirrors the
country in which it is practiced, just as its history and development parallel
American history in the past century. The study of Asia began in a few elite
universities, where it was defined in such a manner as to encompass the same
methods and concerns as the traditional classical studies which it came to
supplement. As in Western Europe, it began with the study of Asian
Indo-European and West Asian languages and spread to include the study of East
Asian languages, to which the study of history, philosophy, and art eventually
were added. It was not until after World War II that Asia became a serious
concern of the Social Sciences, or that much attention was paid to modern and
contemporary concerns.

THE EXPANSION DURING THE COLD WAR
Asian Studies in the United States was most profoundly shaped by a vast
expansion of the system of post-secondary education from the late 1950s and
into the 1960s and 1970s. In this expansion, two elements were particularly
important. First, there was a major infusion of federal government funding
under the terms of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which favored
especially the teaching of modern languages and the Social Sciences. This
affected especially the training  of doctoral candidates, who provided a
substantial portion of the labor supply for new educational institutions and
worked to diffuse the teaching of (modern) Asian subjects in many thousands
of institutions. Second, this expansion coincided with a greatly increased
political role for the United States, within the framework of the Cold War.
(Note the way in which National Defense was used to legitimate the enterprise
in the legislation mentioned above.) I hardly need do more than mention the
Korean War,  the long period of tense confrontation between the United States
and China, or, especially, the Vietnam War, all of which greatly stimulated
the interests of many Americans in Asian subjects. This political context made
it easier to Asia to the public and to prospective students; but it also meant
that far too many people were interested in Asia for what were essentially the
wrong reasons not because Asia was intrinsically interesting and important in
its own right, but because to know something of Asia was supposed to be useful
or relevant to immediate (and most would argue ephemeral) purposes. Asian
Studies in the United States enters the post-Cold War era numerically strong,
by any measure. One indicator of its strength might be the membership of the
Association for Asian Studies (AAS), which totals approximately 6,500 members
who teach at most  important post-secondary educational institutions in the
United States.

MAIN CENTERS AND DISCIPLINES 
American Asianists are by no means evenly distributed, by any measure. Most
of the major centers of Asian Studies are in the northern half of the country,
with disproportionate numbers on the east coast, especially in older
universities. While many might agree that the chief centers of East Asian
studies are at Yale and Harvard universities, of South Asian studies at
Pennsylvania and Chicago, and of Southeast Asian studies at Cornell, such
claims invariably will be contested by the graduates or adherents of other
schools. Particularly in highly specialized fields, like the study of Inner
Asia or Tibetology or Burmese or Singhalese, any one of dozens of institutions
might be best equipped to suit the needs of the aspiring student. Even library
resources are broadly distributed across several scores of institutions, not
to mention language instruction. This situation is not likely to change
materially in the decades to come, because Asian Studies has been relatively
well institutionalized in many different universities. On the whole,
institutions will attempt to conserve and build upon the well-developed
resources they have, and to preserve whatever sources of distinction they
might possess.

NATURE OF THE MEMBERSHIP OF THE ASSOCIATION OF ASIAN STUDIES
Despite the strong contemporary and social-science orientation of educational
policy in the past three decades, traditional humanistic disciplines have
continued to dominate the field. Of 6,388 AAS members who provided information
on their disciplines in 1993, fully 27% were in the field of history, with
about 20% in language, linguistics, and literature, and a total of  11% in the
fields of religion, art and art history, and music, which places 58% of the
membership in essentially humanistic disciplines. Of the remainder, 12% are
in political science and 10% in anthropology, with the remaining 20% scattered
among many disciplines from economics to psychology. The humanists in
particular appear to identify the AAS as their primary scholarly association,
in preference, for example, to the American Historical Association or the
Modern Language Association. It is commonly said  that the AAS has a higher
proportion of its members attending its annual conferences than any other
scholarly association.
The discipline(s) of Asian Studies appear most unevenly distributed when we
consider the countries on which scholars concentrate their attention. Fully
71% of the AAS membership concentrates its attention on countries of East Asia
(including 38% on China and 26% on Japan), while only 15% of the membership
is primarily concerned with South Asia (especially India, 11%), and 13% on
Southeast Asia (where Indonesia garners the most interest, 2%). The Cold War
surely influenced this distribution, as well as more recent economic
relationships; but the historical development of Asian Studies in America has
also worked to skew the pattern in favor of China and Japan. The main quality
of centers and disciplines that we need to note here, then, is highly uneven
distribution, in all respects.

FORMS OF ORGANIZATION AND FINANCING
It should not be surprising that such a large and diverse enterprise  as Asian
Studies in the United States is similarly diverse in its organization and
financing, just as higher education in the United States is highly diverse.
Federal government financing of Asian Studies is minimal. It takes three
forms: annual grants to twenty or thirty university centers of Asian Studies
averaging $100,000 to $150,000 per center; fellowship support for six or eight
graduate students in each of these centers intended to support their study of
modern languages; and research support especially under the Fulbright program
for twenty or thirty faculty each year to facilitate their research overseas.
Considering the magnitude of Asian Studies in the United States, federal
support is a very small portion of the total funding of these activities.

TEACH OR PERISH
The overwhelming bulk of support is integrated into the general funding of
higher education. Virtually all faculty members are incorporated into the
regular budgets of the institutions where they teach, and ultimately their
funding is justified by their teaching especially their teaching of
undergraduate students. Very few Asian Studies professionals are supported
primarily for research or graduate teaching. This is true both for private and
for state-supported educational institutions. In the early decades of Asian
Studies in the United States, considerable support was received from the major
philanthropic foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations; and,
indeed, many now-prominent centers were started with grants from foundations.
The importance of such support has diminished considerably over the decades
since, and it is now a very small portion of the total, dedicated primarily
to specific tasks and activities of limited duration. Private philanthropy,
though perhaps important in a few cases, remains insignificant. The heavy
dependence of Asian Studies upon support from the teaching activities of the
universities is not, in general, a cause for concern in most cases. However,
this funding situation leaves little room for expansion in new directions, and
it is particularly difficult for less-commonly-taught languages and subjects.

NORTH AMERICAN CO-OPERATION
Within this context, the nation-wide Association for Asian Studies (which also
encompasses Canada and Mexico) plays a central role in organizing the field.
The AAS acts as a national interest-group for Asian Studies, sometimes
lobbying for the funding of the profession, and regularly mobilizing the 
membership for common endeavors. Its eight regional conferences annually
assemble across the country from New England to Mexico for scholarly
interchange, usually in October, while the AAS annual conference will attract
nearly half the Association membership to Boston in March of 1994 for 168
scholarly panels, innumerable meetings of committees and special interest
groups, and much discussion of issues affecting  the profession. These annual
meetings are critically important for such a far-flung enterprise: they enable
scholars who work the rest of the year in the relative isolation of, say,
Ithaca and Honolulu, to meet others with similar interests and to catch up on
new research findings, whether these are central to their research or
peripherally touch upon their teaching. 


INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION
As effective as the AAS has been in encouraging cooperation within the field
of Asian Studies in North America there is nothing comparable on a broader
international plane. For the most part, such international relationships as
American scholars are involved in tend to be dyadic, the pairing of American
institutions with institutions overseas for specific purposes, for example in
overseas language-training programs. These tend more often to involve
relationships with Asian institutions than with European institutions. There
surely is considerable scope for improvement of this situation. For example,
there are three or four American institutions and two or three European
institutions which each have separate relationships with one particular
university in Thailand for the teaching of the Thai language: would it  not
make better economic and intellectual sense for there to be a single
relationship? Most of the problems of Asian Studies in the United States are
the problems of higher education in the 1990s: extreme dispersion, a high
degree of particularism and sometimes even parochialism, and what might be
termed a crisis of confidence as the field tries to shape an identity for
itself in a new and changing world. All of these issues deserve attention, but
let me for the moment concentrate upon just one.

Specialization and Parochialism
There was a time, twenty or thirty years ago, when we hoped that the
experience of Asia might be brought to bear on scholarly theorizing and help
to make it less parochial, less Europocentric, and less particular and more
universal. Although in the short run some important thinkers came to include
Asian and other non-Western examples in their work, that trend has since been
reversed, and one could argue that Western social science in particular is as
parochial now as it  was a generation or two ago. This trend has been
exacerbated by the way in which scholars in Asian Studies have been becoming
more and more narrowly focused in their work, partitioning knowledge into ever
smaller and smaller pieces and communicating less and less with scholars even
in closely-related fields. Surely Asia has even more to say to us now, as the
world shrinks before our very gaze, than it did a generation ago. We should
hope that we have more of relevance to say to each other now, across the world
fading boundaries, than we ever did before.