Area studies

 ( Area Studies ) 

Area studies, also known as regional studies, is an interdisciplinary field of research and scholarship pertaining to particular Geography, /federal, or Culture 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 and the humanities. Typical area study programs involve international relations, strategic studies, history, political science, political economy, cultural studies, , geography, literature, and other related disciplines. In contrast to cultural studies, area studies often include diaspora and emigration from the area.

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History While area studies had been taught at the Seminar for Oriental Languages of the Friedrich-Wilhelm University Berlin (now Humboldt-University) since 1887, interdisciplinary area studies became increasingly common in the United States and in Western scholarship after World War II. Before that 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 in the context of the emerging Cold War, as well as to the fall-out from the decolonization of Africa and Asia.

Area studies programs originated within the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor agency to the CIA.

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. Participants argued that a large brain trust of internationally oriented political scientists and 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 Macrohistory 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 U.S.Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 178. 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 U.S. 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.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. 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, 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 scholarships for undergraduate students and fellowships for graduate students.

Meanwhile, area studies were also developed in the Soviet Union.

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Controversy within the field Since their inception, area studies have been subject to criticism—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. Some argue that there is the notion that U.S. concerns and research priorities will define the intellectual terrain of area studies.See Patrick O'Meara, "Changing perspectives on international education", (Indiana University Press 2010), pp. 81. 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.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/

Arguably, one of the greatest threats to the area studies project was the rise of rational choice theory in political science and economics.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). . Retrieved 2009-04-23. 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?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.

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 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.

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Institutions Some entire institutions of higher education (tertiary education) are devoted solely to area studies such as School of Oriental and African Studies or the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.

An institution which exclusively deals with Area Studies is the German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Germany.

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See also

• Cultural studies
• Ethnic studies
• Four traditions of geography
• IATIS
• Interdisciplinarity
• International studies
• Library of Congress Country Studies
• Regional geography

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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.
• (2025). 9780822328261, Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822328261
• Schäfer, Wolf (2010). "Reconfiguring Area Studies for the Global Age." Globality Studies Journal, no. 22. 31 December 2010.

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External links

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