Asian Studies Review. ISSN 1035-7823 Volume 23 Number 2 June 1999 © Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. STUDYING “ASIA” IN ASIA ANTHONY REID Australian National University The four following articles have their origin in the concern to internationalise Asian studies, which emanated from the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) in the United States and the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) in the Netherlands in 1996. Asianists in the Asian region, including Australia, were somewhat marginal participants in this process, although a respectable number attended the eventual International Congress of Asian Scholars (ICAS) in Noord- wijkerhout, the Netherlands, in June 1998—the first fruit of this international- isation initiative. The thoughts which underlie this essay took shape as a keynote lecture at that conference, the organisers having generously invited one of the more sceptical participants in the process to speak. It has been rewritten as an introduction to the set of four articles in this volume, which I initially convened as a panel on ‘The construction of “Asia” in Asia’ for the 1998 Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. INTERNATIONALISATION The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), of which I was President in 1997–98, was predictably the most explicit of the organisations in the Asian region in doubting the appropriateness of a new phase of internationalisation which was not centrally concerned with our Asian colleagues. It seemed to us that the real issue for Asian studies was how or whether it could successfully inter- nationalise in Asia. The dangerous ambiguities of this question are perhaps par- ticularly pressing to Asianists from Australia, the country denounced by Samuel Huntington for contemplating defecting from the West in favour of Asia, and becoming “a permanently torn country”—his hostile characterisation of cultural ambivalence (Huntington 1996, 151–53). This opening essay seeks to explore some of the dilemmas and opportunities for those in the Asian region who would define their field as “Asian studies”.