I am reminded of a criticism I heard from one area scholar about the work of another. The work was criticized for lack of sufficient respect to that culture. We have not resolved this issue or the scholar's relationship to her patron and or client. Area Studies is also criticized for a Failure to Detect Intellectual Imperialism. What I refer to here is the question of who has the right and authority to study and therefore to explain a people of an area.
Area studies needs to facilitate participation by indigenous scholars.
More importantly they need to recognize that we too easily treat the American ideals of scholarship as if they are the only way to conceive and conduct scholarship, as if they written on stone and handed down from the gods, rather than recognizing that our conceptions are historically and culturally rooted constructions. When Asian officials wanted to review and possibly amend the proclamation of human rights essentially authored by America, Secretary of State Albright lectured them proclaiming that there was no other way to frame or express human rights and if they insisted on changing it, then they obviously didn't understand or support human rights. When Hawaiian Studies declares its mission is to do studies and research of Hawaii from an indigenous viewpoint-they are severely criticized by some outside faculty for insisting that there could be a difference between the results of American scholarship on Hawaii and indigenous scholarship on Hawaii. Thus we, the people who study other cultures, have been accused of imposing our intellectual framework and overwhelming indigenous voices. A kind of ethnic or racial triumphalism does not solve the problem only, to my mind, reverses the cultural imperialism.-it's still imposition upon rather than a discussion and resolution of what constitutes evidence regardless of the identity of the scholar.