His proposed work will incorporate a variety of voices and viewpoints based on materials written by Western anthropologists and travelers, by non-Batak Indonesians and by Toba Batak themselves. Mr. Cook will examine the experiences of individual Japanese soldiers during the wars launched first with Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, in China after 1937, and in Southeast Asia and the Pacific after 1941. He hopes to determine what the experiences meant to the soldiers themselves, their families, their survivors and their country's conception of war and national service. In earlier work, she demonstrated that when a people adopt a new language, they carry over specialized vocabulary if the new language does not have sufficient terminology. She hopes to use historical linguistic methods to trace the history of a people in a crucial region, by synthesizing archaeological and documentary evidence with language.
Travel literature is usually a rich source for the study of cultural interactions.
Ms. Smith hopes to supplement her field work with an analysis of current Russian periodical literature. She will be surveying coverage of specific case studies in such areas as Russian architecture, politics and history. By concentrating on the Spanish image of 'European Others' during an era of intense colonial competition and a rising threat to Spanish hegemony posed by England, Mr. Stone hopes to reveal much about the Spanish self-image as well as Spanish imagery of rival European peoples. With much of the focus in recent years centered around Spanish perceptions of indigenous peoples of the New World, Mr. Stone's project should reveal some of the interactions between propaganda and history, image and reality in a European context. A third competition for Mellon Foreign Area Fellowships will be held again in late 1998, for the 1999-2000 academic year.