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area studies person
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« Reply #15 on: January 14, 2006, 06:08:21 AM » |
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Area studies can mean practically anything, but the following are likely:
--people who teach in it will have degrees in specific disciplines, but committments (political, cultural, linguistic etc.) to a specific geographical area.
--as an umbrella concept, area studies venues tend to be explicitly interdisciplinary. For example at an East Asian studies conference, a person might want to go to not just a session on classic opera, but also one on the rise of new cultural forms (such as videogames) in a globalizing world, or on how Confucian thought has been re-imagined in contemporary Singapore, the ecology of tourism in Yunan, or whatever.
This means that practitioners may be very diverse in methodologies, questions, etc., but are bound together by such things as geography, language training, and a perspective rooted in the place they study, rather than just in the US, UK, or EU.
--area studies people tend to be proud of the fact that they spend years acquiring local knowledge, connections and experience with their chosen place, whether or not they come from there. This is how we bond.
--many area studies people, though, also maintain close connections within their discipline. This can mean that we constantly live in a state of marginalization... associated with the "little countries" "funny regions" or "exotic others" or even "diversity".
--when crises erupt in the region we specialize in--even if that has nothing to do with our scholarly expertise--we generally are seen as experts. For example (and I'm making this up) if a secessionist movement or popular uprising happened in rural Laos, an area studies specialist whose expertise was in classic Laotian dance could end up being presented to the world (with some justice) as the person who really knows what's what. Area knowledge in alien contexts can trump disciplinary knowledge.
Finally, in actual university contexts, area studies are frequently lumped together with ethnic studies, women and gender studies, urban studies, etc. as "Interdisciplinary programs".
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