Востоковедение: Междисциплинарные исследования Восточной Азии

Field of scholarly enquiry and education

East Asian studies is a distinct multidisciplinary field of scholarly enquiry and education that promotes a broad humanistic understanding of East Asia past and present. The field includes the study of the region's culture, written language, history and political institutions. East Asian studies is located within the broader field of Asian studies and is also interdisciplinary in character, incorporating elements of the social sciences (anthropology, economics, sociology, politics etc.) and humanities (literature, history, art, film, music, etc. ), among others. The field encourages scholars from diverse disciplines to exchanges ideas on scholarship as it relates to the East Asian experience and the experience of East Asia in the world. In addition, the field encourages scholars to educate others to have a deeper understanding of and appreciation and respect for, all that is East Asia and, therefore, to promote peaceful human integration worldwide. At universities throughout North America and the Western world, the study of East Asian humanities is traditionally housed in EALC (East Asian Languages and Civilizations or Cultures) departments, which run majors in Chinese and Japanese language and literature and sometimes Korean language and literature. East Asian studies programs, on the other hand, are typically interdisciplinary centers that bring together literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, etc. from their various departments and schools to promote instructional programs, conferences and lecture series of common interest. East Asian studies centers also often run interdisciplinary undergraduate and master's degree programs in East Asian studies.

In addition to the above, studies about the history of the Orient have mainly developed in Japan. Orient means areas in North Africa, Eurasia except Europe and islands around them because of chaos due to studies about the history of Greater China and Korea under the Tokugawa shogunate before 1868 and those about the Eastern world from the establishment of European style high educational institutions after that year. The notion about Oriental history that was made between 1868 and 1945 did not spread on other East Asian areas including Korea as the colony of Japan. There have been some Japanese notable historians about Oriental history but they are less famous in other countries.

In universities across the United States, as part of the opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, younger faculty and graduate students criticized the field for complicity in what they saw as American imperialism. In particular, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars debated and published alternative approaches not centered in the United States or funded, as many American programs were, by the American government or major foundations. They charged that Japan was held up as a model of non revolutionary modernization and the field focused on modernization theory in order to fend off revolution. In the following decades, many critics were inspired by Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, while others, writing from the point of view of the quantitative or theoretical social sciences, saw area studies in general and East Asian studies in particular, as amorphous and lacking in rigor. Critiques were also mounted from other points in the political spectrum. Ramon H. Myers and Thomas A. Metzger, two scholars based at the generally conservative Hoover Institution, charged that "the 'revolution' paradigm increasingly overshadowed the 'modernization' paradigm" and "this fallacy has become integral to much of the writing on modern Chinese history", discrediting or ignoring other factors in the history of modern China. In Europe, notable scholars of East Asian studies have long occupied professorships at prominent universities in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy, while recent publications also suggest that the "Nordic countries offer some unique contributions in the field of East Asian studies."