Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity

This interdisciplinary volume is a new introduction to area studies in the framework of whole-world thinking. Emerging in the United States after World War II, area studies have proven indispensable to American integration in the world. They serve two main purposes: to equip future experts with rich cultural-historical and political-economic knowledge of a world area in its global context and advanced foreign language proficiency, and to provide interested readers with well-founded analyses of a vast array of the world's communities.

Area Studies in the Global Age examines the interrelation between three constructions central to any culture—community, place, and identity—and builds on research by scholars specializing in diverse world areas, including Africa; Central, East, and North Asia; Eastern and East Central Europe; and Latin America. In contrast to sometimes oversimplified, globalized thinking, the studies featured here argue for the importance of understanding particular human experience and the actual effects of global changes on real people's lives. The rituals, narratives, symbols, and archetypes that define a community, as well as the spaces to which communities attach meaning, are crucial to members' self-perception and sense of agency. Editors Edith W. Clowes and Shelly Jarrett Bromberg have put into practice the original mission of US area studies, which were intended to employ both social science and humanities research methods. This important study presents and applies a variety of methodologies, including interviews and surveys; the construction of databases; the analysis of public rituals and symbols; the examination of archival documents as well as contemporary public commentary; and the close reading and interpretation of fiction, art, buildings, cities, and other creatively produced works in their social contexts. Designed for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in allied disciplines, Clowes and Bromberg's volume will also appeal to readers interested in internationally focused humanities and social sciences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Feb 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781609091873

Book preview

Preface

Area studies combine the multidisciplinary teaching and research about a particular area of the world with intensive study to attain a high level of proficiency of at least one area language. Our book, Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity, offers an introduction to contemporary area studies for students entering graduate programs, as well as scholars and other readers interested in a comparative view of area studies. Since the so-called turn of the late 1980s and early 1990s, area studies have become a kind of border zone, under attack from constituent disciplines, both social sciences and humanities, each for different reasons.¹ In many colleges and universities they have yielded in interest to umbrella studies, such as foreign affairs or international relations, which have less rigorous requirements. Although it is difficult to define their actual object of study (because it is diffuse), area studies have proven to be an indispensable component of the academic curriculum, as well as general American knowledge about the world. Area studies serve two main purposes. The first is to train future experts with advanced foreign-language proficiency and strong humanistic and social-scientific knowledge of a world area in its global context. The second purpose is to provide Americans, and the English-speaking world more generally, with rich, multifaceted, well-contextualized analyses and interpretations of the world’s communities. Among the foci of area studies are the perceived structures of authority and authenticity in a society, defined at an appropriate geographical scale (whether global, national, regional, or local) and type of formation (whether cultural, social, economic, or political, or a mix of various types).

Area Studies in the Global Age is devoted to examining the interrelation between three constructions central to any human culture—community, place, and identity. It builds on research by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, specializing in diverse parts of the world, including Africa; Central, East, and North Asia; Eastern and East Central Europe; and Latin America. While remaining rigorously true to the realia of our particular research areas, we set forth the clearly distinctive features of the cultures treated here and encourage well-documented commonalities to rise to the surface. Recognizing the claim of our so-called global world—which purportedly transcends spatial and cultural boundaries—to have opened the world’s borders to trade, communication, and economic opportunity, the analyses presented in each chapter show again and again that particular communities in which people live their lives and the places to which they perceive themselves as belonging are of life-defining importance. Beyond the rituals, narratives, symbols, and human archetypes that define a community, the space to which these elements attach meaning are crucial to a member’s self-perception and self-understanding. Through this process of attaching significance, a space becomes a place, and the meaningful place becomes an indispensable emblem for defining and understanding identity.²

Despite the increasingly mixed (hybrid) and displaced identities that the world’s migrant populations are adopting, belonging to a group and a place—imagined and constructed as those may be—and articulating and enacting an identity, are crucial components for a meaningful life. In short, we bring the following question to this book, which is at once a place-­defining and border-crossing experiment: beyond the usual, and very pressing, global material concerns of our time (such as environmental change, availability of water and health care, and abuse of human rights), are there traceable commonalities among the communities and their identities that we treat here? Fully aware that each chapter represents one small piece of colored glass in the hugely complicated mosaic that is the contemporary world, we argue that in these fifteen chapters certain dominant figures do emerge that promote a nuanced picture of identity and community in the early twenty-first century.

In Area Studies in the Global Age we have undertaken the challenge of putting into practice the original interdisciplinary mission of US area studies. Area studies are the ideal site for pathbreaking interdisciplinary inquiry; since their founding in the 1940s, they were intended to draw on both social-science and humanistic research methodologies. Our introduction to area studies draws on a variety of approaches and techniques—including conducting interviews and surveys in the field; constructing and coding databases; building typologies; rendering rhetorical, structural, and thematic analyses of print sources from contemporary writing culture; using archival documents; and interpreting fiction and other creatively produced texts. Typically, research produced with the support of area studies funding has tended to pay most attention to policy decisions, economic numbers and trends, powerful social-political groups (elites), and political leaders. With a number of exceptions that do examine leaders, their rhetoric, and their decision-making processes, articulated and enacted at the top of the power structure, the focus of most chapters is on the voices, perceptions, and mentalities of ordinary people not in power, and their articulations of community, their behavioral enactments of a particular identity, and their attachment to a particular place to which they have assigned symbolic meaning. Of crucial importance to all the chapters is the target community’s definition of our place—and how that place shapes identity.

This book developed following a conference on Identity and Community after the Cold War Era, held in August 2011 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Scholars from a broad array of disciplines and area studies programs joined forces to explore and discuss recent developments in local and regional communities and, as the conference call for papers put it, to probe how these developments have affected the community of all peoples and the formation of new communities across the world. At the conclusion of the conference, several University of Kansas area and international studies directors held a roundtable discussion about the future of our research in these often contested communities, places, and identities. When a group of graduate students approached the organizers to convey their enthusiasm about the introduction to area studies that they felt they had received over the previous three days, their excitement confirmed our decision to press forward with a book designed precisely for beginning graduate students, as well as other readers interested in expanding their knowledge.

Central to the conference discussion was the shifting nature of the world after the opening of the Iron Curtain, the coming of NAFTA and other open border trade agreements, the end of apartheid, and the opening of other seemingly fixed and closed borders. These themes are the foci of Area Studies in the Global Age. One of the points of contention at the conference was the emblem of the Cold War, which was relevant to some world areas but not necessarily to others. The idea of the Cold War implied a specific post–World War II world order with a dominant imagined geography of geopolitical power and influence. The Cold War binary pairs opposing communist vs. capitalist, USSR vs. USA, and East vs. West, were much less important in certain parts of the world than the colonial binary relationship contrasting the North and South. These binaries have generally shattered, though other binaries increasingly plague the world, such as the growing and destabilizing differential between rich and poor. Despite the growth in the 1990s of big picture theories, such as rational choice theory, cultural anthropology and various postmodernist theories have underscored the importance of local and regional development in the increasingly complex, postbinary world. It is in these local communities, for example, that various waves of new religious fervor have found a reliable foothold, as well as young people to support new power structures, staff new armies, and enforce new claims on territory. To highlight these perspectives, our group agreed to a simpler title, Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, and Identity.

An enduring criticism of area studies concerns the unfocused descriptiveness and lack of interpretive framework of area-specific research. It was curious, though perhaps not entirely surprising, that many conference participants indeed did employ sophisticated framing concepts and often shared concepts, assumptions, and theories. Along with the work of theorists, such as political anthropologist Benedict Anderson, philosopher Etienne Balibar, cultural studies scholar Homi Bhabha, psychologist Julia Kristeva, and historian Pierre Nora, the research of many area-specific specialists can open fresh questions and avenues of research beyond their own area of the world. Thus, two features of Area Studies in the Global Age orient students to the uses of various methodologies and concepts. Each chapter contains a description of methodologies employed, consideration of the ways in which material and data were collected, and definitions of guiding critical concepts. An annotated bibliography of useful theory and scholarship found at the back of the book will help beginning researchers formulate their research questions.

Although the topics in this book cut across major areas of the world, analyses are typically local and regional. As different as people may seem in diverse parts of the world, all define themselves through borders. Beyond their strategic importance, borders more than ever have profound meanings for the people who draw them and believe in them, and whom in turn they define. For example, the Mexican-US, the Russian-Ukrainian, the Hungarian-­Serbian, and the Iraqi-Turkish borders have never been more important to the governments and regional residents involved. The terrain we inhabit, the meaning we give to that space that turns it into meaningful place, the communities to which we perceive ourselves to belong, and the ways in which we see our communities with respect to others—all shape our identity. And that identity informs the decisions we make and the ways we carry them out. Place-oriented narratives of self, histories, memories, rituals, traditions—all are the fundamental ground on which social and political communities are built and identity is formed.

Area studies provide a reality check to large-model fashions in political studies and economics, particularly rational choice theory and formal theory. They offer local and regional perspectives on the global crisis of community, as well as a range of topics and disciplinary approaches that make interdisciplinary academic research exciting and productive. Among the authors of this book are cultural, social, and art historians, literary critics, geographers, and international relations experts. All of the authors have professional proficiency in languages other than English—an indispensable tool for understanding the vocabularies of local and regional identity and community, and their relationships to global processes.

Interdisciplinarity is the touchstone of Area Studies in the Global Age. Though governmental and private funding agencies alike have paid lip service to interdisciplinarity, area studies research has typically remained in the bailiwick of the social sciences. To our knowledge this book engages and combines more fully than any other a broad set of methodologies that area studies scholars need in their toolkits. Some approaches are traditional, which in and of itself is no reason to exclude them. A qualitative examination of state actors, their rhetoric, and their formation of state-generated communities, remains a useful approach (Vanderbush). The study of arts communities as sites of resistance to state censorship and police control likewise echoes Cold War realia, which, unfortunately, remain in force (Apostol, Callen).

Other approaches are newer to area studies. Several chapters (Bromberg, Harris, MacGonagle) employ memory studies to address questions concerning writing and rewriting national history. Three chapters (Smiley, Thelen, Chen/Kennedy) combine quantitative and qualitative methods to address issues of mental geography and the ways in which ordinary people transform terrain or space into meaningful place. In all three chapters a focus on subjectivities and personal perceptions across a sizable data sample suggests a useful explanation of the reasons for which a community might either cooperate with or resist central government leadership.

Still other chapters use a combination of traditional intellectual historical perspectives applied to current public debates; the close, interpretive reading of literary and visual texts, which are central to articulating place, community, and identity; and theoretical frameworks new to area studies. A number of chapters employ discourse theory (Clowes, Hanks, Vanderbush) and human rights theory (Janzen). For many of the chapters, fieldwork involving both qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with human subjects was crucial to obtaining new insights into the nature of specific identities and communities (Greene, Chen/Kennedy, Omelicheva, Smiley, Thelen). The main chapters are bookended by an introduction that defines area studies and its main themes in the post-turn world and a conclusion that offers an international relations perspective that both supports and challenges area studies (Zarakol). To help readers discern commonalities in this mosaic, we have divided the chapters into four thematic parts—rethinking national history, contrasting regional and national identities, challenges to civil society, and legacies of imperial systems. A brief introduction to each of the book’s four parts frames crucial concepts, highlights common themes, and previews each chapter. Further commonalities emerge in chapters across the book’s four parts.

Area Studies in the Global Age offers a productive reinvention of area studies, now employing social science and humanities tools to attend to the subjectivities and experiences of people in all kinds of communities across the world. It draws attention away from leaders and the halls of power and listens closely to voices that articulate perceptions and represent groups that either are or could eventually become mobilized to tip the scales of power. We intend these approaches to challenge the reader to define the broad outlines of place-oriented identity and community in our complex twenty-first-century world.

Notes

1. The word turn is taken from the German term die Wende, used to describe the end of the Soviet regime and the transition to parliamentary democratic governance in the five states of the former German Democratic Republic, resulting in 1990 in the reunification of all sixteen states as the Federal Republic of Germany.

2. Two crucial conceptual frames for this book come from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Robert Sack, A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good (London: Routledge, 2003).

Introduction

Area Studies after Several Turns

Edith W. Clowes and Shelly Jarrett Bromberg

Not only is the world not flat: in many ways it has been getting less flat. . . . At the last round of trade negotiations, the Uruguay Round, for the poorest countries of the world, it wasn’t that they got a small share of the gains—everybody expected that; that’s power politics—but they actually wound up worse off than they had been before, it was so unbalanced, so asymmetric.

—Joseph Stiglitz, Carnegie Endowment, 2006¹

In the light of world events of the early twenty-first century these words by economist Joseph Stiglitz sound mild but still prescient. Embedded in them is the warning that despite the much-heralded promise of the new democratization and globalization of the 1990s, many countries and peoples in the new century were not only not better off but indeed sinking further into poverty and debt. The world of the twenty-first century has seen an effort by United States administrations and the media to minimize the problems lurking behind regime changes in Eurasia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, while at the same time reducing funding to train the specialists who provide government and media with reliable information on the ground. On one hand, since the mid-1990s various US administrations and members of the press have often promoted a self-congratulatory discourse, asserting the progress of US-led globalization and democratization—this stance despite the attacks of September 11, 2001, the repeated worldwide economic downturns of the new century, and the rise of brutal, religiously motivated tyrannies. As late as 2004 Thomas Friedman coined the term flat earth to express the idea that the world economy expanding across relatively open geographical borders, enabled by fiber-optic technology, the Internet, and social media, would benefit billions of people. These new technologies, developed since the late 1990s, were supposed to be empowering individuals, allowing a flat or at least more level playing field in which everyone has equal opportunity and equal access to material well-being. ² On the other hand, the 1990s wave of democratization of previously authoritarian states—meaning the transition to more transparent, secular, and representative forms of government—has largely stalled or ebbed. The gap between the world’s richest and poorest is wider than ever. ³ The opening of borders and the tremendous power of social media have sometimes produced just the opposite of the intended results; they have allowed previously isolated individuals and groups to mass together and form more virulent communities, including the resurgence of ultra-rightist religious movements and the rise to power of religiously oriented nationalisms in Africa and Eurasia. Clearly the newly liberated did not always veer toward a Western notion of democracy—communities formed in the wake of repression, war, or trauma can mirror the behavior of their previous oppressors. Indeed, Paulo Freire’s observation that the oppressed often become the oppressor during struggles of liberation too often holds true. ⁴ The victims of the new oppressors have been women and other people, who have benefited, or stood to benefit, from new democratic rights and the global expansion of wealth, from secular, inclusive educational systems, religious tolerance, and more open trade policies. Functional slavery, sexual slavery, vast migrations, new political and religious oppression by a new minority in power—all are hallmarks of the world’s new disorder.

This superficial celebration of world democracy and the benefits of globalization inevitably has resulted in a view that area studies are parochial, which in turn has contributed to the shrinkage of area studies funding by the government and to the absorption of area studies curricula into international studies in American universities.⁵ The result is the weakening and further underfunding of area programs that for decades produced language proficiency and broad cultural, political, and economic training needed to build knowledge about local and regional communities in poorly understood parts of the world. The world saw the impact of inconsistent funding and training, for example, in American adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq at the start of which the US government scrambled to identify well-trained language experts and reliable local and regional information.

Currently general global studies or international studies programs enjoy popularity among students and administrators alike partly because they typically have few foreign-language and special area requirements and because they save faculty positions. Students tend to read English-language sources, which give them a dangerously skewed view of the world’s communities and systems of change. Without the rigorous requirement for foreign-language proficiency, students’ understanding of area mentalities and values remains rudimentary. On the other hand, it should be said that proponents of area studies have not done enough to highlight the crucial cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of their work and the necessity of language learning to a high degree of proficiency. Ultimately, by supporting a more general and less rigorous curriculum for understanding the world, the US government and the academy have wasted a valuable resource developed over many decades.

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Area Studies in the Global Age addresses the issue of parochialism, by juxtaposing an array of mainly nonelite communities across the world. The organization of material is intended to add useful detail, needed for understanding the real local and regional effects of democratizing and globalizing initiatives. Our goal is to introduce new students of area and global studies and related disciplines to the methodologies that produce accurate, real-world information. The communities studied here are dealing with some form of crisis that leads their members to rethink their identity. In some cases, that crisis may have been precipitated, indeed, by the very act of opening borders that globalization wrought.

The approaches to area studies deployed here share some basic assumptions about human nature. We believe that most humans need to have some sort of stable community and place, however imagined, to which they perceive themselves to belong. Lacking those elements and faced with serious economic, political, or other crises and challenges, people are likely to rebel in unforeseen ways that might seem to a US observer not to serve their best interests. The foreign policy, academic, and finance communities ignore those specifics at their own peril. These assumptions are quite different from the enlightenment view informing democratization and globalization that human nature is universally rational, however that slippery term is defined. People everywhere, so economists’ and the international relations community’s rational choice thinking goes, make decisions in the same consistent or rational way, regardless of culture, taste, or belief, by evaluating costs and benefits and acting so as to maximize their net benefits.⁶ The question about what people perceive themselves to need and how they make decisions is certainly more complicated than simply being consistent or adhering to Western-inspired notions of what people ought to want. For example, by no means is the question of a universal human nature always answered by a model of identity that one scholar has called the American self-interested individualist prototype.⁷ The research presented in Area Studies in the Global Age shows that while the struggle for personal betterment defined in terms of civil and human rights might sometimes hold true, other goals often take priority, for example, a strong community, political-cultural ambitions, and a secure place to which our community belongs, or, indeed, mere survival under a newly oppressive regime.

Rational choice thinking is still influential in international relations curricula in American universities. It is a real concern that these same simplistic assumptions then spill into US foreign policy, as students become professional specialists, who in turn become employees and later employers in government, business, international development, and the academy. Representatives of international organizations fostering what they hope will be beneficial reform often know too little about local and regional mentalities and systems of value to be effective in promoting positive change. As Mariya Omelicheva suggests in her book, Democracy for Central Asia? Perspectives and Strategies Promoted from Without and Within, organizations supporting democratic practices often lack cultural awareness, sensitivity, and knowledge of local contexts. The Western democratizers’ own experiences typically overshadow the context and background information on the transitional states.⁸ Area Studies in the Global Age makes the case for a more detailed and ultimately effective view of the world, alert to the subjectivities of ordinary communities, the views and desires of people and groups who are not in power but who hold passionately to a particular identity. In doing so, our book also makes the case for an area studies sensitive to shifting transnational and transcontinental subjectivities.

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The new approaches to area studies that we claim here are not necessarily new. Our project is committed to practicing what area studies proponents inside and outside the US government have always touted but have not practiced—a rigorous and self-aware interdisciplinarity, deploying both humanities and social-science techniques and methodologies, to study diverse societies and cultures. Before we define the new area studies further, it will be helpful to summarize a brief history of area studies, how they began and how they have evolved. Instituted in the last years of World War II with support from US government intelligence services, area studies had the goal of collecting information about poorly understood, non-Western parts of the world in order to keep the United States and the free world safe from communism.⁹ Eventually, under Title VI the US Department of Education funded national resource centers at major research universities to spread information to the educated community; foreign language and area studies fellowships (FLAS) to support the study of crucial languages; and Fulbright-Hays grants for specialist research in critically important countries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Soviet empire unraveled and the Chinese empire turned toward something resembling a capitalist, market economy, that need seemed obviated. Although colonialism in Africa officially ended in various countries at various times after the end of World War II, giving way to major community and identity shifts, apartheid ended in South Africa at about the same time as the Cold War, thus removing one of the engines for producing communist-­oriented resistance communities. In Latin America and elsewhere, the United States’ military and political support for anticommunist dictators during the Cold War era was now recast as economic and military backing in the guise of democratizing the region. As Greg Grandin argues, for Latin America after the Cold War, democracy came to be defined strictly in the astringent terms of personal freedom rather than social security.¹⁰ For many countries, this economic and political autonomy was tied directly to neoliberal policies and forms of democracy that were now being prescribed as the most effective weapon in the war on terrorism, used to guarantee stability in the region.¹¹

With the end of these worldwide threats in the 1990s, area studies seemed less relevant to US policymaking and consequently declined as a curricular and research priority. After their failure to predict the changes of the 1980s and 1990s, many leading academic players in the old area studies—specialists in politics and economics—left the field. Economics departments reduced area studies tenure-track positions at universities across the country and devoted their research and teaching to large-scale modeling.¹² Politics departments often combined area studies and international relations specializations into one faculty position.

Some academics argued that area studies were too closely connected to the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence branches of the US government.¹³ While some supporters characterize area studies research as rigorous and detailed knowledge, critics often see it as being too descriptive and narrowly parochial, lacking a theory, a set of definitions of its research questions and objects, and an interpretive framework.¹⁴ Still others criticize area studies practitioners for replicating in their actual research real imbalances of power between the United States and other less wealthy countries.¹⁵ In other words, US researchers were not heeding the voices and opinions of researchers and other actors in other countries and regions. Area studies in its original form, we claim, did not live up to its original definition as an interdisciplinary area of inquiry. While focusing mainly on the social sciences, many critics did urge interdisciplinary approaches, though, we repeat, typically only among the social sciences.¹⁶

Throughout the 1990s, the Departments of Defense and State recognized the training of foreign area specialists with professional proficiency in what they defined as the critical languages of the world as a priority for continued US security. Both departments developed a number of sources of government funding to promote high-level foreign-language learning. In 1991 the Boren Bill created the National Security Education Program (NSEP) to send US students abroad to perfect their foreign language skills. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense has supported the development of civilian foreign-area experts. Since 2002 through its Language Flagship Program it has funded centers and scholarships for students at universities throughout the United States to produce language speakers functional at a superior level of full professional proficiency. From 2005 to 2015 the US Army used the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS), an organization that hired and imbedded anthropologists in US Army units in battlefield areas, beginning in Iraq and Afghanistan and then expanding to regions of Africa.¹⁷ The purpose of the HTS program was to learn more about the structures of authority and the needs of local communities in order to win civilians to the invaders’ side (that is, the US/NATO side), rather than to fight only on the kinetic terrain of the battlefield. For the history of area studies the most important aspect of this program was the recognition in the highest halls of US military power that language proficiency and cultural knowledge were central to military efforts. In 2006, the US Department of State created the Critical Languages Program to send students to perfect their language skills in non-central, non-English-speaking parts of the target country. And in 2007 the Department of Defense funded Project GO, meant to support foreign-­language learning among ROTC cadets.

In these initiatives, funding for area studies curricula has lagged as funding has increased to develop advanced language curricula and language support programs. The Department of Education’s Title VI program has been wildly inconsistent in its support of area studies teaching and research. In 1997 the Ford Foundation helped to renew and rethink area studies through the Crossing Borders initiative, which gave middle-sized grants to twenty-five US universities and colleges to develop area studies curricula and to encourage programs to create new networks and partners. Strongly challenged by forces of globalization—understood as trade and movement of peoples and resources across relatively open borders—area studies programs had to confront the question, Are there definable world areas?¹⁸ Our provisional answer is yes, with the understanding that borders, though much more porous than they were in the Cold War, are not only not dissolving but are strengthening as large-scale migration and other cross-border crises continue. In many cases borders have only become more complicated and now include boundaries both internal and external to nation-states. Borders do not exactly coincide with geopolitical territories, cultures, and languages as traditionally assumed. Area Studies in the Global Age provides a more fragmented and nuanced but also more pertinent definition of current world areas and the issues confronting them. In a real sense, this book defines specific communities, identity formations, and constructed places—and the borders that continue to shape them—while also representing a useful experiment in the spirit of the 1997 Ford Foundation initiative in crossing borders and defining commonalities, in terms of both geographical place and discipline-specific methodologies and research agendas.

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We define the new area studies as a set of culture- and geography-specific objects of study that can be investigated with the benefit of multiple disciplinary and comparative area perspectives that are designed to produce useful, reliable knowledge about those objects. The practical purpose of area studies is still to develop specialists with professional-level foreign-language proficiency and broad-sector knowledge in particular world areas and, as much as possible, also among world areas. The new area studies strive to achieve the following:

• bring into focus self-perceptions and subjectivities, as well as perceptions of what might be called spatial belonging of ordinary people in their locally, regionally, nationally, and supranationally defined communities;

• reach beyond the traditional area studies objects of study—political actors and institutions of state power—to include the actions and perceptions of non-elite communities as more than just reactions to state directives; and investigate grassroots formations of communities, innovations, and vocabularies of identity through all sorts of media—religion and the arts, as well as political rhetoric and ethnic narratives—all in the context of institutions of authority and power;

• promote inter-area comparison and contrast based on rigorously gathered, authentic facts, and resist the move toward global modeling that has little real-world explanatory force, while also recognizing and taking advantage of useful and important quantitative research approaches favored by political scholars and economists;

• respect the view that to ignore subjectivities and complexities of people in particular cultures is risky behavior that leads to continued errors in international policy.

The new area studies draw on several methodologies, conjoining where relevant detailed textual interpretation and attention to products of writing culture and artistic production with larger-database typological analysis and statistical findings. Traditional humanities are strong for their attention to subjectivities, close reading and thematic and structural interpretation of cultural texts, and sensitivity to rhetorical registers that can tell us more about message than a naïve reading can. Humanities approaches are strengthened through area studies exigencies of relevant context building; awareness of structures of power, authority, and authenticity; and knowledge of historical, social, political, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Of particular usefulness in this book are approaches garnered from postcolonial and postcommunist theory and research on imagined and imaginative geographies, memory studies, discourse analysis, and gender studies.

Social sciences—among them, sociology, politics, and economics—traditionally have been strong in constructing the big picture, which means numerical, normative generalizations about social, economic, and political formations and attitudes. In contrast, particularly cultural anthropology and human geography have developed strength in detailed, thick description of specific communities, their social composition and structure, rituals, narratives, and symbols. Human geography places greater emphasis on the context of the particular place that a community constructs, and its symbolic meanings.¹⁹ Applied to area studies contexts, social science approaches become more attentive to other—perhaps not normal or average but still significant—subjectivities, their cultural rituals and expressions of identity. In short, the new area studies employ a strong use of qualitative cultural description and interpretation, combined with numerical analysis, and argue that institutions are composed of people with particular views, beliefs, predilections, and ritualized behavior patterns, which are always messy and complex but well worth the study.²⁰

Being interdisciplinary is more than what has been termed parallel play in the same sandbox.²¹ Competent new area studies specialists should be proficient in a number of different methodologies. This book is for graduate students who will become government, business, NGO, and academic specialists of the future; it defines what counts as credible primary sources and data, and it presents approaches to collecting and interpreting several types of materials and data with the goal of promoting productive interdisciplinary thinking. These approaches offer a corrective, too, to international relations, which strive for a big picture, a transportable generalization, based on studying top-down elite structures and government and economic institutions, a generalization that international relations specialists want to apply anywhere in the world.²² This research is guided by two questions: how best to study cultural subjectivities, mentality, and closely held systems of value among people who are not elite and live their lives outside of circles of power, though both affected by and affecting policy; and how best to define the concept of successful change. We urge area studies students to focus in part on ordinary people in their self-defined communities and investigate their value systems, mentalities, and actions; and on that basis to build an accurate picture of these perceptions and their interaction with broader decision-making processes.

Area studies have always put strong emphasis on geographical space. Here we give space a somewhat different focus, concentrating on the concept of geocultural place—alternatively called imaginative geography, imagined geography, or mental geography—as an area or space in which a particular community defines its identity and distinguishes itself from other communities who are perceived as not belonging. It is space defined symbolically as that place where we belong and through which we interpret our history and our hopes for the future, and, importantly, to which they, the others, do not belong. With this emphasis, area studies interdisciplinarity can offer a discerning view of the effects of large-world trends on particular communities and their identities; the impact of those communities on large-world trends; as well as tracking similarities and contrasts among the world’s myriad communities.

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In Area Studies in the Global Age, borders emerge as a decisive kind of space, crucial to delineating place, community, and identity. In her conclusion to the book Ayşe Zarakol uses the important psychological-spatial concept of the liminal to define nation-states in the early twenty-first century. Many psychologists (Jung), anthropologists (van Gennep, Turner), literary theorists (Bakhtin, Lotman), and cultural studies scholars (Bhabha) have defined the idea of the liminal and, in other words, the idea of threshold or border experience that, broadly speaking, changes one’s perspective and defines one’s sense of belonging to a community.²³ The ubiquity of the term belies the globalizing view that the world is flat and free of borders. It is precisely the perception of borders and thresholds that challenge existing power and promise resistance, even rebellion. In some cases, such as with political, cultural, or economic avant-gardes, the liminal experience can produce culturally, socially, and politically innovative formations. Zarakol uses the liminal to designate states situated complexly between the Great Powers, particularly the United States, China, and Russia. She has in mind states that do not clearly fit into a traditional imagined geography or a community of shared values, clearly belonging, for example, to geopolitical notions of the East or the West, geo-economic concepts of the North or the South. Repeatedly, the liminal and various forms of threshold, or border, experience are foregrounded in Area Studies in the Global Age. While our focus remains on community and identity formation with relation to meaningful place, it will become clear that, in contrast to global theory touting the benefits of open borders, defining borders, crossing borders, changing public spheres, and shifting culturally embedded behaviors all belong to this book’s bigger theme of the liminal.

Political scholars have called the notion of region (and presumably all other kinds of meaningful place) a spatial construct and a mere metaphor for other economic, political, and social forces at work.²⁴ In this view, region as such is not a cause but a product. In Area Studies in the Global Age we view regional, local, as well as national place as focal points for identity formation and meaningful human activity—certainly a spatial construct, but created by communities building meaning in a particular space perceived as ours. Indeed, it may be the liminal that is the guiding metaphor for the new emphasis on border experience in Area Studies in the Global Age, now used to understand a world undergoing shifts, displacements, and disorientations as to who we are and where we belong. An infamous prison transformed into a memorial space; a museum with former political inmates as the guides; a rural village being squeezed as an enclave in an amoeba-like, burgeoning city; a shared heroic narrative becoming the object of contention between new states; a security police archive re-created as art object—all are examples of transformational change, open-ended struggles sometimes to change and sometimes to maintain geocultural structures of identity and community.

Beyond demonstrating the variety of approaches and methodologies available to area studies and various strategies for building relevant context, Area Studies in the Global Age offers pieces in a mosaic that open to view the world as perceived by mainly non-elite people confronting some sort of crisis or challenge to their identity, who might be building or reinventing community, or are struggling to keep community viable after the borders opened—or, further, may be trying to establish new borders in order to build new community. The communities in our world, as these studies suggest, are reevaluating globalization and democratization—whether surviving the destruction of community, in part, because of changing borders, reworking community memory, rethinking a symbolically significant place, or building community across borders.

Notes

1. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Joanne J. Myers, book presentation and interview on Making Globalization Work, Carnegie Council, October 5, 2006, accessed June 27, 2014, https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/studio/multimedia/20061005/5397.html/_res/id=sa_File1/Making_Globalization_Work.pdf.

2. See Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 10–11.

3. Stiglitz