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178 SPECIFICITIES OF GLOBALIZATIONperspectives. In other words, we have to be careful ofthe limitedness of our perception, of what we consumeand believe. Only with this awareness of the limitationof the self can we allow Diversity—not only of physicalappearance, such as ethnicity as generally understood,but also diversity of the meanings of things—to trulyexist and operate.NOTES1I do not want to drop names here, but in order to confirmthat this is not just a personal imagining, but that someacademics have already taken it very seriously, I wouldlike to refer to Jacques Derrida, who coined the termdifférance to explain the process in which words, what wewrite, read, speak, always defer meaning—although myexperience here may be a simpler version of différance. InDerrida’s deconstruction, in which différance operates,to find a meaning of a concept/sign involves a process ofpointing beyond itself, of always referring to somethingelse, something different. The concept/sign is, therefore,never fully present, and its meaning is always deferred.Likewise, when I was in the field of research, I wouldhave liked to capture the reality of it. But all I found weremany versions of it, told by many people as they perceivedit. These multiple explanations of reality are endless, andthe reality (if there is one behind those explanations),thus, is always deferred. When I held to one version ofan explanation of reality, I pushed away other possibleversions. Realizing this, therefore, I was in a constant stateof “chasing reality.”2For the same reason as Note 1, I would like to refer hereto what Foucault calls the empirico-transcendentaldoublet—where one is in the reluctant state of being boththe subject and object of gazing (Foucault 1994).3 It should be noted that this representation and mixingacross cultures also took place long before the modernperiod and has continued to take place since then.4 It should be mentioned here that a kind of ‘internalOrientalism’ also exists, such as how the Japanese view,say, Okinawa or Thailand, and how Bangkokians viewother parts of Thailand, but this is beyond the scope ofthis paper.and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Clarke, John. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter betweenAsian and Western Thought. London: Routledge, 1997.Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1981.Du Bois, William E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. London:Penguin Classics, 1989.Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London:Tavistock Publications, 1972.__________. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books,1994.Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York:Basic Books, 1973.Josephson, Jason. “When Buddhism Became a “Religion”:Religion and Superstition in the Writings of Inoue Enryo.”Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 33.1 (2006): 143-168.Loy, David. “Review of Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Studyin Nihilism and Ironic Affinities by R.G. Morrison.” AsianPhilosophy 8.2 (July 1998): 129-131.Mena, Paul. Tenement Landscapes. Trans. Kazue Daikoku.Tokyo: Happa-no-Kofu, 2001.Prendergast, Christopher. The Triangle of Representation. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2000.Reader, Ian. Religion in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu:University of Hawaii Press, 1991.Screech, Timon. The Western Scientific Gaze and PopularImagery in Later Edo Japan: The Lens within the Heart.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Tippakarawongse Mahakosadibbhadee (Kum Bunnag),Chao Phraya. Nang Sue Sadang Kijjanukij [Note on VariousMatters]. 1867. Bangkok: Khurusapha, 2002.REFERENCESBauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and its Discontents.Cambridge: Polity, 1997.Befu, Harumi. Hegemony of Homogeneity. Melbourne: TransPacific Press, 2001.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter BenjaminAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows