Area studies
Area studies are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/federal, or cultural regions. The term exists primarily as a general description for what are, in the practice of scholarship, many heterogeneous fields of research, encompassing both the social sciences and the humanities. Typical area study programs involve history, political science, sociology, cultural studies, languages, geography, literature, and related disciplines. In contrast to cultural studies, area studies often include diaspora and emigration from the area.
History
Interdisciplinary area studies became increasingly common in the United States and in Western scholarship after World War II. Before the war, American universities had just a few faculty who taught or conducted research on the non-Western world. Foreign area studies were virtually nonexistent. After the war, liberals and conservatives alike were concerned about the U.S. ability to respond effectively to perceived external threats from the Soviet Union and China and the emerging Cold War, as well as to the fall-out from the decolonization of Africa and Asia.
In this context, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York convened a series of meetings producing a broad consensus that to address this knowledge deficit, the U.S. must invest in international studies. Therefore, the foundations of the field are strongly rooted in America. Participants argued that a large brain trust of internationally oriented political scientists and economists was an urgent national priority. There was a central tension, however, between those who felt strongly that, instead of applying Western models, social scientists should develop culturally and historically contextualized knowledge of various parts of the world by working closely with humanists, and those who thought social scientists should seek to develop overarching macrohistorial theories that could draw connections between patterns of change and development across different geographies. The former became area studies advocates, the latter proponents of modernization theory.
The Ford Foundation would eventually become the dominant player in shaping the area studies program in the United States.[1]
In 1950, the foundation established the prestigious Foreign Area Fellowship Program (FAFP), the first large-scale national competition in support of area studies training in the United States. From 1953 to 1966, it contributed $270 million to 34 universities for area and language studies. Also during this period, it poured millions of dollars into the committees run jointly by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies for field development workshops, conferences, and publication programs.[2] Eventually, the SSRC-ACLS joint committees would take over the administration of FAFP.
Other large and important programs followed Ford's—most notably, the National Defense Education Act of 1957, renamed the Higher Education Act in 1965, which allocated funding for some 125 university-based area studies units known as National Resource Center programs at U.S. universities, as well as for Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships for graduate students.
Controversy within the field
Since their inception, area studies have been subject to critiques—including by area specialists themselves. Many of them alleged that because area studies were connected to the Cold War agendas of the CIA, the FBI, and other intelligence and military agencies, participating in such programs was tantamount to serving as an agent of the state.[3] Some argue, that there is the notion that U.S concerns and research priorities will define the intellectual terrain of area studies.[4] Others insisted, however, that once they were established on university campuses, area studies began to encompass a much broader and deeper intellectual agenda than the one foreseen by government agencies, thus not American centric.[5]
Arguably, one of the greatest threats to the area studies project was the rise of rational choice theory in political science and economics.[6] To mock one of the most outspoken rational choice theory critics, Japan scholar Chalmers Johnson asked: Why do you need to know Japanese or anything about Japan's history and culture if the methods of rational choice will explain why Japanese politicians and bureaucrats do the things they do?[7]
Following the demise of the Soviet Union, philanthropic foundations and scientific bureaucracies moved to attenuate their support for area studies, emphasizing instead interregional themes like "development and democracy." When the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, which had long served as the national nexus for raising and administering funds for area studies, underwent their first major restructuring in thirty years, closing down their area committees, scholars interpreted this as a massive signal about the changing research environment.[8]
Fields
Fields are defined differently from university to university, and from department to department, but common area-studies fields include:
- African studies
- North African studies
- Berberology (Berber studies)
- Egyptology
- North African studies
- North & Latin American studies
- American studies (in the United States this has traditionally referred primarily to North America and especially the U.S.)
- Latin American studies
- Asian studies
- Central Asian studies
- Middle Eastern studies (or Near Eastern studies)
- Assyriology
- Caucasology
- Chechen studies
- Armenology (Armenian studies)
- Georgian studies
- Iranian studies
- Persian studies
- Kurdology (Kurdish studies)
- Islamic studies
- Judaic studies
- Turkish studies
- Seljuq studies
- Ottoman studies
- East Asian studies
- Sinology (Chinese studies)
- Teochew studies
- Hakka studies
- Taiwan studies
- Japanology (Japanese studies)
- Ainu studies (Ainu people)
- Ryukyuan studies (Ryukyuan people)
- Koreanology (Korean studies)
- Manchurology
- Mongolian studies
- Tibetology
- Uyghur studies
- Yi studies
- Zhuang studies
- Sinology (Chinese studies)
- South Asian studies
- Indology (Indian studies)
- Pakistanology (Pakistan studies or Pakistani studies)
- Southeast Asian studies
- Burma studies
- Indonesian studies
- Javanology
- Khmer studies
- Lao studies
- Philippine studies
- Thai studies
- Vietnamese studies
- European studies
- Austrian studies
- Baltic studies
- Byzantine studies
- Classical studies
- Dutch studies (nl:Neerlandistiek)
- French studies
- Breton studies
- German studies
- Hispanism
- Irish studies
- Italian studies
- Romance studies
- Scandinavian studies
- Slavic studies (Slavonic studies or Slavistics)
- Russian studies
- Ukrainian studies
- Belarusian studies
- Czech studies
- Polish studies
- Bosnian studies
- Bulgarian studies
- Croatian studies
- Serbian studies
- United Kingdom studies
- Anglo-Saxons studies
- Celtic studies (Celtology)
- Cornish studies
- Welsh studies
- Scottish studies
- Manx studies
- Pacific studies
Due to an increasing interest in studying translocal, transregional, transnational and transcontinental phenomena, a Potsdam-based research network has recently coined the term "TransArea Studies" (POINTS – Potsdam International Network for TransArea Studies).
Other interdisciplinary research fields such as women's studies (also known as gender studies), disability studies, and ethnic studies (including African American studies, Asian American studies, Latino/a studies, and Native American studies) are not part of area studies but are sometimes included in discussion along with it.
Institutions
Some entire institutions of higher education (tertiary education) are devoted solely to area studies such as School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London, or the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan. At the University of Oxford, the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) and St Antony's College specialise in area studies, and hosts a number of post-graduate teaching programmes and research centres covering various regions of the world. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, is the only institution with immense contribution towards popularising area studies in India. An institution which exclusively deals with Area Studies is the GIGA (German Institute of Global Area Studies) in Germany.
See also
References
- ↑ Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 178.
- ↑ David L. Szanton, "The Origin, Nature and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States," in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton (University of California Press, 2004), pp. 10–11.
- ↑ See Bruce Cumings, "Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War," in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29 (1997). http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/cumings2.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-23.
- ↑ See Patrick O'Meara, "Changing perspectives on international education", (Indiana University Press 2010), pp. 81.
- ↑ Moseley, W.G. 2009. “Area Studies in a Global Context.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Nov 29. http://chronicle.com/article/Area-Studies-in-a-Global-Co/49284/
- ↑ See "Rational Choice Theory," by John Scott, in Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of The Present, edited by G. Browning, A. Halcli, and F. Webster (Sage Publications, 2000). "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-02-27. Retrieved 2008-07-30.. Retrieved 2009-04-23.
- ↑ See Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, "A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies," The National Interest 36 (summer 1994), pp. 14–22.
- ↑ See Cumings article, cited above.
Further reading
- Kuijper, Hans (2008). "Area Studies versus Disciplines: Towards an Interdisciplinary, Systemic Country Approach". The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Vol. 3, Issue 7, pp. 205–216.
- Miyoshi, Masao; Harootunian, Harry D. (2002). Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 0822328267.
- Schäfer, Wolf (2010). "Reconfiguring Area Studies for the Global Age." Globality Studies Journal, no. 22. 31 December 2010.
External links
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The dictionary definition of area studies at Wiktionary