ABSTRACT
This chapter provides concluding remarks to this volume, focussing on three themes: (1) the problems of Anglophocentrism in the Japanese context – the ways the dominance of English as the lingua franca of global communication makes it difficult for non-English publications to achieve recognition outside the Japanese-language sphere; (2) the potentials of the results of numerous Japanese-language research activities that have accumulated over decades, the overseas introduction of which would enrich the world community of social sciences; and (3) the pitfalls such attempts have often fallen into, particularly in the form of cultural nationalism. The chapter then proposes ‘cosmopolitan methodology’ as a broad framework to tackle these problems, potentials and pitfalls, suggesting that we should endeavour to develop multiversal, rather than universal, approaches to the analysis of the world around us. This is nothing less than a call for the end of Occidental universalism, which derives only from the particular experiences of the West. The chapter also casts doubt on the viability of nativist approaches that fail to engage in transnational dialogue. We are appealing for a relativistic universalism, which brings into the global discourses of social inquiry various perspectives that have been developed in the periphery of the world system of knowledge.
