ABSTRACT
It is not difficult to read an element of romanticism in the notion of area studies as a vocation. In the most banal terms, we say that one is drawn to study Japan or Thailand because one is in love with ‘it,’ whatever that ‘it’ might be at different moments in one's life. And it is here in the realm of the romantic that sentiment and mystification become difficult to tell apart. Having fallen in love with the foreign, learning its language and reconstructing its history, one might then begin with some justification to consider oneself to be an authority who can speak for the place and its people to those at home (Rafael 1999, para. 19).
