Suchergebnisse

South Asia consists of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, & Afghanistan. Until WWII, the study of this area was almost entirely restricted to the humanities. Since the 1920's, the humanistic scholars dealing with South Asia had felt that the soc sci's should be added, but had not succeeded in getting an expanded program into the US educ'al system. WWII made it evident that the soc sci's should be added. Large foundations assisted in establishing South Asia centers, a Joint Committee of the Amer Council of Learned Societies & the Soc Sci Res Council was established in 1949, & the gov began to support South Asia studies by instituting a foreign language fellowship program. The latest development of South Asia studies has been the establishment of the Amer Institute of Indian Studies in India. Further necessary developments are outlined. AA.

The author looks at South Asian studies in Australia, courses on and enrolments in South Asian studies at different Australian universities, the teaching of South Asian languages (especially Sanskrit and Hindi) at some of these universities among other issues. She (the author) points out areas in which government funding remains essential for South Asian studies. (DÜI-Sen)

In 1986 the International Activities Committee of the Economic and Social Research Council decided to undertake reviews of progress in 'area studies', and to do this by means of small, inter-disciplinary conferences. A review conference on South Asian studies was held in Cambridge, and attended by forty-one scholars from different disciplines and from India, France, Holland and the USA as well as from Britain. The purpose of the review was understood to be a 'stock-taking' in different fields of research, intended to identify conceptual, theoretical and substantive issues at the frontiers of enquiry; and to examine the implications and contributions of research on South Asia for historical research and for the social sciences in general. In the pursuit of these objectives the conference had three components. First came sessions in which two economists (Toye and Chaudhuri), two historians (Tomlinson and Washbrook), an anthropologist (Fuller) and a sociologist (Hawthorn) presented views of 'progress and problems' in their fields. Then came two pairs of concurrent working groups on broad themes, drawing partly on the earlier papers and discussions; and finally three panelists (Bharadwaj, Breman and Lipton) offered commentary on the proceedings. The review papers by Toye, Tomlinson and Washbrook appear in this issue of Modern Asian Studies. What follows here is a commentary on some of the themes that emerged in the papers and discussions.