Oriental Studies in Russia: New Reality, Old Challenges

Abstract

The report by Vasily A. Kuznetsov Deputy Director for Research of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Russian Oriental Studies: Challenges and Prospects for Development in the New Reality,” released in the fall of 2023, draws attention to the complex issues facing Russian Oriental Studies in the new geopolitical reality. The “Turn to the East” concept, widely declared at the state level, creates both new growth opportunities and fundamental challenges for Oriental studies. Among the latter, Vasily A. Kusnetsov largely highlights factors related to intra-academic discourse and technological development. The most significant of them are to determine the place of Oriental studies in the modern system of production of scientific knowledge, characterized by a high degree of methodological segmentation of disciplines, and the development of machine translation algorithms, potentially eroding the core of Oriental studies — proficiency in the Oriental language. We are inclined to agree with the existence of both exogenous factors in the development of academic oriental studies, which, however, are also characteristic of the global context. In this article, we propose to pay attention to the challenges characteristic of the Russian academic and educational context. The growing interest of the state, business environment and the society in Oriental studies is due to the rapid transformation of the geographical structure of Russia’s foreign economic relations, where former familiar partners from Western countries are being replaced by new counterparties, whose star is rising in the East. There is a growing demand for orientalistic expertise and for the skillful personnel speaking Eastern languages. Oriental studies as an academic discourse and as an educational standard bears a heavy burden of responsibility: the problem of inflated expectations. From Oriental studies they are expected to build conceptual bridges between Russia and the East, from Oriental studies-graduates is expected high-quality work in a wide range of branches of foreign economic activity, where the only thing that will connect them with Oriental studies as an academic specialty is knowledge of the Oriental language. The current demand dictates the need to change existing educational programs and the system of reproduction of orientalistic knowledge. However, the ice separating the dark waters of the corrosive properties of the market from the actualization of the existing academic paradigm seems to be thin.