59changing a research problem lightly implies a no less free and rational moral act.
Ethical-methodological overlap is already apparent when turning research partici-
pants into a case or a research problem by “pathologizing” and problematizing them
(Nind et al. 2004 ).
In a broad sense, an “Asian HE research field” is a discursive space where an
interplay of structure and agency occurs by problematizing Asian HE academics,
students, and other research participants by tagging and classifying them (e.g., brain
gain and drain) with overt cultural invasion and disruption. The very concept of
“research field” denotes an economy of power relations (Foucault 1983 ) in Asia.
Under an imposed colonial and Cold-War peripheriality, the “West and the rest,” the
Asian HE embraced alien ideals of HE that gave priority to their pragmatic goals
and analytical-positivistic methodologies at the expense of humanities as well as
social studies. Across Asia, HE knowledge production became the crucible where
researchers and research participants, now colonial subjects, unwittingly lost their
subjectivity with generally weak “forms of resistance against different forms of
power” (Foucault 1983 , p. 211).
Higher Education and Asian Problems
The problem of subjection and submission in knowledge production indicates self-
imposed limitations in agency that are deeply rooted in the xin (心 mind-heart) of
Asian researchers. Naoki Sakai ( 2010 , p. 448) tries to explain, for example, why
Asians have difficulties with theorizing in humanities and how theoretical elabora-
tions came to be understood as the exclusive possession of the West. He argues that
the Western conception of West is not geographical but a distinction in knowledge
production in humanities. He elucidates it with the terms humanitas (Latin) and
anthropos (Greek) ( 2010 , p. 455):
Humanitas has signified those people who could engage in knowledge production in both
the first and the second relationships—namely, in the empirical as well as transcendental
relationships, hence, empirico-trancendental doublet—while anthropos has gradually been
reserved for people who participate in knowledge-production only in the first. Thus, human-
ity in the sense of humanitas has come to designate Western or European humanity, to be
distinguished from the rest of humanity—so long as we trust in and insist upon the putative
unity of the West.This point contrasts with Stuart Hall’s ( 1992 ) that the concept of the East emerged
when the West formulated a “West and the rest.” In Sakai’s argument, the East-West
distinction is a distinction in knowledge production in humanities and understating
of social realities, namely, social sciences. Sakai also implies that global knowledge
production rides on the conceptual binary of West and non-West. Sakai takes it as
almost innate that Asians have been relegated to the intellectual periphery, namely,
Anthropos; hence, Asia might produce knowledge but it is incapable of strong theo-
ries as it lacks a logical-metaphysical tradition, which relegates Asia to the produc-
tion of positivistic and pragmatic knowledge. Sakai’s view of the global knowledge
4 Higher Education Knowledge Production in Postcolonial-Neoliberal Asia