ABSTRACT

Area studies of Asia can be said to be a product of the post-Second World War new world order under hegemony of the United States (US). Certainly, it was owing significantly to the Orientalist scholarship conducted under the auspices of the older colonial regimes in the region that in turn left a substantial mark on the study of the classical traditions of Asia, histories of the states, and, not least, ethnology of indigenous and tribal peoples. Some of the colonial scholarship, such as phrenology, eugenics, and even linguistics – the nineteenth-century king of the classical disciplines – did not survive well in the post-war period; nevertheless, the legacy of the others was still perceptible until the turn of the twentieth century.