ABSTRACT. Area studies evolved during the past half century as a way of trying to link the various academic disciplines as partners in an effort to achieve a holistic understanding of uniquely different non-Western territories or places, each with its own history, traditions, culture and unique political, social and economic characteristics. This effort had little impact upon the established disciplines, each of which persisted in entrenched methods and concepts rooted, for the most part, in the recent past and current problems of Western societies. Escalating globalization now challenges both of these orientations, and calls for a perspective anchored in a world-system point of view and understanding of the world. This world can be conceptualized as having parts or components subject to specialized study, both geographically and historically, by regional and local categories, and functionally, by aspects of human behavior. To go beyond area studies, therefore, is to seek a new global synthesis in which cross-cutting perspectives support and amplify each other. Such a synthetic perspective may emerge spontaneously but not automatically -- it therefore requires active encouragement and conscious efforts. Although continuing to build on the achievements of established disciplines, it also requires serious modifications within each, especially to recognize that many of their basic premises are context-bound to Western situations and circumstances. For generalized applicability on a global basis, they need to be "internationalized" -- or, perhaps better, "globalized."

NOTE: This paper is still under construction, lacking notes and bibliographic references to be added later.

Beyond Area Studies implies a futurist orientation. What comes next? The question to ask is not what will evolve within the context of area studies but what will replace it? How does it relate to Sociology, to Social Science, to History and the Humanities, to Natural Science? Perhaps we also have to ask about the future of knowledge, of learning, of our understandings about ourselves and our world. The question has no boundaries -- it opens large vistas. Academic papers, by convention, set parameters and limit inquiry -- we know that much lies outside a spotlighted area, but self-imposed restrictions liberate us from the need to talk about them. In this paper, by contrast, we must let our imagination flow freely because, although there will be retrospective comments, the focus is on what will or can be. Although the topic invites documentation and supporting data, the paper is informal and speculative, perhaps a precursor to more scholarly analysis backed by firmer evidence and tighter logic. But here we have only an informal essay.

The topic has two dimensions: first, what has happened to area studies in a globalizing world and how can it be changed to respond appropriately to these events; and second, in its new forms, how will area studies understand and interpret the unfolding world system? As originally conceived, these were to be two parts of a single paper, but each part has grown so much that I have decided to split them into separate papers. This exercise, therefore, deals only with the first topic, leaving the second for discussion in a follow-up paper.

The Development of Area Studies.

When area studies became popular after the end of World War II, they reflected a felt need to move beyond the academic disciplines, each of which had established boundaries of scope and method to restrict its inquiries. Although each discipline sought universalistic (nomothetic) knowledge, its basic premises (except for Anthropology) were Western (Eurocentric).

When the need to learn more about all the new countries formed as a result of the collapse of industrial empires became apparent, efforts were made under the heading of area studies to use the resources provided by all the disciplines as tools to help focus attention on a geographically delimited area. In each area, their focus was on particularistic (idiographic) descriptions that married all the relevant disciplines in the expectation that, thereby, we could develop integrated packets of knowledge that would illuminate parts of the world that had hitherto remained as terra incognita.

This was a challenge to expand our knowledge of the world by exploring new ground, and it happened, also, to meet important felt needs. One was essentially political or strategic in character: "cold warriors" on both sides of the Iron Curtain wanted to learn how to build alliances and stabilize areas of the world in which their influence and ideologies would prevail. At the same time, hopes for expanding world trade and economic development everywhere led to financial support from would-be beneficiaries of global growth. Optimism about rapid development and modernization created a euphoric mood that inspired governments and foundations, especially in the United States, to sponsor and fund the rapid development of area studies. They relied mainly on field work by a host of scholars supported for overseas research, backed by new institutes or centers where area studies were located, within Universities but outside existing departments.

To understand the explosive growth of area studies starting in mid-century, we should recall that, when the industrial empires were collapsing in the wake of World War II, a host of new states were born into what promised to become either a new world order, or a polarized world split between Communism and Capitalism. Under either set of assumptions, it seemed clear that Western governments and peoples knew much too little about the evolving world of the liberated new states or "underdeveloped" countries, as they were often called. With a mixture of motives -- to enhance ideologies, to cultivate democracy, the rule of law and stable governance and, especially, to encourage economic growth -- scholars and advisers were sent from the more affluent countries to work in the less fortunate ones, both to help them in various ways and to learn about them. Area studies evolved in that context as, primarily, a Western enterprise, above all in the United States, designed to support foreign experts and students seeking to help and learn about these areas for a combination of intellectual, economic and strategic reasons.

Intellectually, scholars responded to the challenge to learn about unfamiliar peoples in far-away places, to make new uses of the disciplinary skills and concepts they had evolved almost exclusively in the Western contexts. Moreover, in these contexts, entrenched and highly institutionalized academic structures supported specialization as a way to learn more and more about less and less, thus permitting specialists to thrive in an environment where modernity, especially the industrial revolution, had made specialization a key to success. Becoming a specialist on a hitherto unknown place in the world seemed like an opportunity not to be missed because it would enhance everyone's career opportunities. Thus the intellectual challenge also supported personal ambitions.

Economically, the contrast between the wealth of industrialized countries and the poverty prevailing in new states also generated a strange alliance between scholars and industrialists. Scholars, for humanitarian reasons, saw poverty as an intellectual challenge -- how can we explain it and what can be done to overcome it. Capitalists were enchanted by the notion that if poor countries could industrialize, they would be able to open up new markets and raw material sources and further increase their own wealth. The themes of development and modernization linked these two concerns -- the scholars to focus on the reasons and the solutions and the capitalists to provide the funds, technical expertise and organizational skills.

At the strategic level, the Cold War, especially rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, provided a third strand in the rope that supported area studies. Increasingly, governments in all of the more affluent countries saw that their strategic political interests would be affected by the attitudes of people in all the new states -- and especially by their governments and the international alliances they formed, the policies they pursued.

Ethnocentrism.

The paradigmatic foundations for area studies were deeply ethnocentric. Just as Columbus was thought by Europeans to have been the first to "discover" new lands in the Western hemisphere, so a new generation of area specialists imagined that they were discovering unknown peoples and cultures. The difference could be noted that whereas Columbus and his successors treated the indigenous peoples with disdain and sought only to conquer and exploit them, the area specialists viewed their enterprise as essentially benign -- they were to be instrumental in helping the unfortunates of the world develop -- i.e., become more "like us."

No doubt the inhabitants of the lands whose ancestors had occupied them long before 1492 CE, must have laughed at the irony and presumptuousness of these strange "pale faces", as they later came to resent their intrusion and oppose the conquests which deprived them of their independence and life styles. Contemporary peoples who were to be subjected to analysis by externally mounted area studies had little to say about themselves in this process but at least the promise of good intentions gave some of them hope that by cooperation they would benefit.

As for those who supported and developed area studies, there was no doubt in their own minds that they would be able to advance the welfare and knowledge of the peoples they were now able to study close at hand. No doubt there were sharp critics in the West who questioned both the effectiveness and motives of area specialists, especially when they came to view them as allies of multi-national corporations and neo-imperial powers more interested in exploiting weak peoples than in helping them. Nevertheless, in the main stream, area studies were viewed as not only humane projects designed to help those who were studied, but as essentially humanitarian and also as, academically, important because they contributed new knowledge about our world.

The Current Crisis.

Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bottom dropped out of the support structures that had enabled area studies to develop and flourish. These demoralizing consequences of globalization -- if we may use this word to characterize the new world (dis)order in which we are now living -- have been well analyzed and explained by Gabriel Almond in an unpublished paper. Because area studies were not built into the established departmental structures of our universities, they found themselves an endangered species. Despite the deep crisis of contemporary higher education, especially in major research-oriented public universities, most academic departments will be able to survive, but extra-departmental special institutes and study centers that depended heavily on external funding are now in serious trouble. The strategic and economic motives that had sustained and developed them during the past half century have largely vanished.

Both governments and private foundations that had previously joined forces to support centers for area studies and finance graduate students and senior scholars to venture abroad and do cross-disciplinary research in unfamiliar places now shifted priorities and decided that it was no longer important to fund area studies. Perhaps most conspicuously, the end of the Cold War has undermined the support contending regimes formerly offered area specialists for strategic reasons. Faced by new contingencies -- some of them directly attributable to mounting globalization and especially to pancapitalism -- the focus of attention has shifted to the increasingly complex and perplexing patterns of production, trade and consumption throughout the globe in which countries are no longer seen as especially important. Instead, they are viewed as mere platforms or stages on which the significant actors are widely dispersed cosmopolitans moving freely to any place that, for the time being, attracts their interest, especially where money can be made. The notion that states could dominate and shape their economies is no longer accepted. Especially in poor and undeveloped countries, money talks and politicians can be bought, at least that's a widely help image. Consequently, both the political and economic motives for funding area studies have dwindled.

Simultaneously, the intellectual foundations for area studies have also eroded. To emphasize multi-disciplinary cooperation is to take the validity of each discipline for granted. The intellectual certitudes of all the disciplines are put in doubt as leading scholars have begun to recognize -- perhaps partly, at least, because of the successes of area specialists -- how parochial their own stock of methods and knowledge really is. The rise of hybrid fields and the shock of overseas experiences have undermined many old assumptions held by discipline-based scholars

Nevertheless, the need for scholars to understand our world, in all its dimensions and parts, has become increasingly urgent as globalization has made everyone in the world increasingly interdependent. We need to think seriously about what can be done to protect the new knowledge that has been gained during the past half-century, and to place it in a more promising context. Several far-reaching changes in the world are relevant here and need to be mentioned before we can talk about a new context for area studies -- and, indeed, for all the social sciences.

The most important aspect of this global transformation involves the rise within many (if not all) countries of new educational institutions and a rising tide of indigenous scholars who have received advanced training in all the social sciences. In his paper on Distorted Internationalization of Sociology, Mattei Dogan provides solid evidence for the spread of Sociology in many (though assuredly not all) countries. This development will undoubtedly continue as manifested in the growing global membership of the International Sociological Association -- and, indeed, of all sister associations belonging to the International Social Science Council. Without questioning the competence of scholars teaching in countries that lack resources and dependable support for objective scholarship, it is surely true that, increasingly, in every country there will arise a growing body of social scientists capable of studying and reporting on social problems and phenomena within their own countries.

Admittedly, the Western higher educational experiences of most of these scholars have conditioned them to think in terms of basic paradigms or concepts that are essentially Eurocentric. However, many of them are well aware of this and seek vigorously to overthrow the blinkers that hamper their ability to understand their own countries. At least, they always have an advantage which Westerners have not had that their own training makes them comparativists -- they know a lot about the outside world and it provides a context for them to understand themselves. Some, no doubt, rebelliously, repudiate their own Westernization and seek to re-discover their indigenous roots and cultural foundations, but they probably constitute only a minority.

A second aspect of contemporary globalization involves the rise of new tools and structures that can support the further development of area studies. Among them, international associations like the I.S.A., and the supporting infrastructures mounted by UNESCO and a host of international and regional organizations, require our attention. These organizational resources are now undergirded by a new technology, most notably by the rise of the INTERNET, and the capabilities it provides for storing and distributing information, in hypertext, via the World Wide Web, augmented by the capacity of individuals, through e-mail, to organize their communications on a global basis. At the very moment when support for area studies within the United States and other Western countries is collapsing, the capacity of scholars throughout the world to understand, study, and report on their own societies is growing. The world beyond area studies needs to take this into account. It leads, I think, to the emergence of a sequel to area studies that might well be called global studies.

The Advent of Global Studies.

Although still embryonic, can we not imagine what a world-wide network of global studies will be like? It should, I think, provide a context in which all that we have learned so far under the rubric of both the social science disciplines and area studies can be conserved but also re-shaped into new patterns. The parochialism of our established disciplines will have to be overcome, a point well noted by Mattei Dogan in the paper mentioned above. Essentially, each discipline that has a narrowly "Western" point of view needs to recognize that much of what it knows is contextually bound -- it does, indeed, apply in Western settings but needs radical re-thinking when it is applied outside its traditional homelands.

Similarly, area studies requires a radical re-vamping. Above all, the exogenous perspective of foreigners looking into countries as outsiders needs to be replaced by the endogenous perspectives of scholars looking at their own societies, both for use in local teaching and research to help their citizens understand their own problems and also to enable outsiders to gain a more balanced understanding of their situations. However, in any country local scholars also suffer from the risks of parochialism and even from prejudice, especially when authoritarian regimes impose orthodoxies that hamper scholarly objectivity. Increasingly, therefore, scholars in all countries need to join forces with foreign friends to create partnerships in which comparative and balanced analyses can be achieved. The "Local-Global" cooperative research project that Henry Teune and his associates in many countries have been carrying on for many years provides a good example of how such research can be done. Scholars in each country bear primary responsibility for their own local research, but their capacity to share comparable information leads to global learning and better self-understanding in each case.

The Area Focus.

The evolving global context requires that we re-think the fundamental concept of an area. In such a context, our world system will be viewed as having many parts, but all of them are socially constructed and reductionist. In order to understand any part of that whole, we need to view it in context.

Area specialists imagine slices of territory as fundamental units of analysis -- they partition the world as one might cut a wedding cake into separate slices. For most social scientists each such area is bounded by the borders of a state -- exceptionally, anthropologists seek to identify more unified micro-level culture areas. This criterion has worked fairly well in post-Westphalian Europe where, indeed, the modern state has become a decisive basis for social integration and decision-making. However, in the non-Western world, especially in many new states carved out of collapsed empires, states are little more than artificial administrative/military jurisdictions created by their former imperial masters. Not only are these states typically so weak they cannot perform most of the normal functions of a state, but their populations are cultural mixtures or fragments of nations that lack any sense of homogeneity -- they cannot be called "societies" in any sense of this much battered word.

In the world today, not only does the artificiality of statehood in non-Western countries make "areas" defined by state boundaries increasingly slippery as a framework, but in the Western world itself globalization has undermined the salience of states as a focus of analysis, while all kinds of new sub-state and trans-state entities play an increasingly important role in world affairs. This undermines the traditional state-oriented basis for both traditional disciplines and area studies and requires us to create new criteria for partitioning the world-system into manageable units of analysis.

Perhaps the easiest way to see how globalization has recently transformed the world is to consider the implications of mobility. This word applies equally to information, goods, and migration and has radically transformed whatever geographic domains we think of as "areas." In our conventional perspectives, we tend to think of an area as a stable territorial unit in which people live together for generations, producing and consuming the goods and information they need in relative isolation from outsiders, following their own cultural norms and practices while indifferent to those of outsiders. Although no doubt this image was never literally true, it was true enough to anchor area studies.

Peoples who formerly lived in relative (never complete) isolation from the outside world were able to develop their own institutions, languages and cultural practices as distinctive and unique phenomena that could be identified and described by outsiders. The prototypical area specialist was a cultural anthropologist who adopted a "primitive village" and described it as a kind of miniature world-system. That perspective has been re-shaped by area specialists as an image that political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, economists, geographers, historians and humanists can all use as they apply their special skills to the cross-disciplinary study of different societies throughout the world, normally using states as the implicit premise for defining their areas of study.

For convenience, area specialists often created regional categories so that groups of states could be viewed as though they constituted a meaningful area. Thus we created the notion of the Middle East -- or even the older notion of the Near East -- even though inhabited by a complex mixture of diverse peoples and cross-state nations. Southeast Asia is a novel construct that now embraces the Philippines and Indonesia, non-continental off-shore islands of continental Asia and people who have rarely, if ever, seen themselves as a territorial entity. With a population of 18 million, less than that of Taiwan (21 million), Australia is conceived of as a continent whereas Taiwan is viewed as a part of China and, hence, of East Asia.

Nevertheless, when area studies were launched as a significant enterprise after World War II, it seemed reasonable (though unrealistic) to think of a territory as a land area with a stable population, culture, economy, political system, and boundaries. Increasingly, all these premises have eroded as mobility has accelerated during the past half century.

Rising Mobility: Information, Goods, Migration

In traditional societies, insiders did not see themselves as unique, although they often made a "we/they" distinction in which the "we" were civilized and humane whereas all the "theys" were viewed as uncouth foreigners. Now, increasingly, growing access from many sources to information about the rest of the world has transformed not only the way people view themselves but also the way they behave -- indeed, this knowledge changes their attitudes and behaviors so that it often becomes more like that of the outside world and begins to lose its most unique qualities. Perhaps as in quantum physics, we have learned that to study an area is also to change it. It is hard to describe something that is transformed by its description -- we need to see all phenomena as processes that can be changed by our efforts to analyze them. Outsiders not only report about insiders but, in the process, inform their subjects of inquiry and, thereby, change them.

Although trade in goods and services has occurred among all civilized peoples since world-systems first evolved, and even the most isolated communities had some external exchanges, the pace of such trade has increased so radically in recent years that the everyday use of objects imported from abroad has become a ubiquitous feature of life everywhere in the world. Traditional arts and crafts have also changed in response to the world market's demand for them and the need of local people to produce exportables to exchange for the imports they now want. In this context, the distinction between what is purely local and what is part of the world market system has become increasingly fuzzy. The markets of remote communities are now stacked with objects manufactured for tourists while authentically indigenous artifacts have become rare "finds."

Perhaps most importantly, personal mobility has vastly accelerated the migration of people between their original home places and external locations. Migration includes not only voluntary movement as some individuals everywhere seek better economic, social and educational opportunities for themselves and as employers hunt for cheaper and better qualified employees, but it also includes refugees fleeing oppression, looking for safety and freedom. The new technologies facilitate migration by providing faster and cheaper means for travel and more information about available opportunities abroad that increase their attractiveness to potential travelers. Without going into this familiar subject any more, just consider two complementary effects on any area: first many former residents leave and second, many non-residents enter. Increasingly, the population within any area becomes more mixed, and those who emigrate retain memories and contacts that lead them to cultivate various kinds of links with the area from which they moved.  Thus the local contains much that is global, while the global is increasingly penetrated and re-shaped by many locals.  

All these forms of mobility have transformed the identity of many area, making it both easier and more difficult to study. It is easier because increasingly what one sees anywhere is what one finds everywhere -- one can almost take if for granted. Globalization simply has a homogenizing impact that increases the similarities that make all humans resemble other humans wherever they happen to live. However, for the dedicated area specialist who wants to discover what is specific and special about each area, the task becomes more difficult. Much that was endogenously unique has vanished and defies analysis except through archaeological and historical records -- or interviews with aging survivors. Much of what one finds in any area is recent and contemporary, leading outsiders to reject it as exogenous.

Yet for the insiders who have accepted modern innovations and assimilated the exogenous, the endogenous may have been forgotten and dislocated. This distinction leads outsiders to focus on vanishing practices and objects whereas insiders increasingly fasten their attention on what is new and evolving. A symbol of this shift in focus can be seen in any tourist center where outsiders hunt for remnants of exotic folk dances, traditional music and folk art, while the locals flock to hear rock music, to buy cellular phones and watch imported movies or television shows. Specialists on local music ignore new compositions by local composers because they are not "authentic" even though they may well be what all the locals are listening to. What the area specialist values may be what the local has rejected, and what is now popular is seen by outsiders as irrelevant.

Diasporas.

A growing tendency of migrants to retain or recreate links with their homelands is also redefining areas, transforming the focus of area studies. In fact, area specialists probably find it easier to attend to the changes that are occurring within the geographic zone they choose to focus on than they do to understand the transformation of spatial concepts that is now going on. Anyone seeking to learn about what it means to be a Filipino, Lebanese or Venezuelan has not only to study what is happening in the Philippines, Lebanon or Venezuela but to go around the world to visit with those who came from these countries but live elsewhere. Formerly, one could put them down as mere emigrants who, having abandoned their homelands, chose to live as more or less well adapted immigrants in some other place. Strident nationalism in the hostlands where they settled sped the melting pot processes whereby they assimilated to their new homes and cut the ties that linked them with their former homelands. Although these processes were never complete, they worked well enough to support the myth that the people of any area were those who lived there -- while those who left just vanished.

Globalization, however, is radically changing that reality. Increasingly those who leave can return home and maintain their old ties of family and nationality. It is important not to use diaspora to characterize minority communities living outside their homelands. Many of them, indeed, do sever their ancestral ties. I speak of any community as a "diaspora" only to the degree that its members, whether or not they actually migrated, maintain various contacts with a homeland from which they have become separated. Of course, diasporans may assimilate in their hostlands and become well integrated there, simultaneously maintaining a kind of Janus-faced orientation in two or more directions at once. They can send money and goods to their relatives and friends back "home," participate in political movements, or work in companies whose manufactures and trade hinge on old country contacts.

Diasporans sometimes participate in areas studies programs as specialists on their homelands -- indeed, a foreign student who wants to assimilate and do a doctoral dissertation based on materials available in h/er hostland is often discouraged and, instead, urged to return "home" to collect data. A paradoxical process of diasporization occurs when individuals who at first wanted to sever their home ties find themselves compelled by forces beyond their control to restore or activate these links. Migrants can float in and out of their diasporas in response to converging forces from many directions. Thus diasporization and de-diasporization are complementary and continuing processes -- one is not automatically in diaspora because s/he has migrated, and many diasporans never migrated, they were simply cut off from their homelands by boundary changes.  

Diasporization is impelled by new forces in the homelands as well as those operating in hostlands. Increasingly, governments view members of their diasporas as a resource to be tapped, a responsibility to be honored, or a danger to be contained. They may press ex-students formed by a country's brain drain to come back home, to share the expertise they acquired living abroad and, of course, intentionally or not, to import exogenous influences in the process. Homelands may press their diasporas to support them politically, to acquire goods, weapons, knowledge, money, and even to recruit foreigners, for the benefit of the "motherland", or of a rebellious movement within that homeland. Sometimes, moreover, diasporans become pawns in international politics -- if they are victims of oppression, they may be used as pretexts for intervention. They may be used as conduits for funds and information designed to influence the foreign policies of their hostlands.  Homeland governments may promote diasporization of their "overseas" citizens for a variety of political, economic, and social reasons. To ignore them, therefore, is as irresponsible for area specialists today as to overlook all the innovations that have transformed life in traditional societies.

The Disciplines.

To think of area studies as a way of linking disciplines to use as tools for understanding a given area presupposes the validity of each discipline as it stands. Yet the same forces of globalization that have undermined the validity of areas as a focus for study have also thrown all our social science disciplines into chaos. A proper understanding of the global context in which area studies need to be re-shaped should take into account the fundamental transformations that are needed in all social sciences to re-focus them. Their traditionally Eurocentric contexts hamper their ability to deal with social realities in the Rest of the world that simply cannot be properly understood or discussed in terms of the established social science concepts which presuppose the basic infrastructures of Western societies. To enter into a discussion of this subject here would take us well beyond the parameters of a paper on "area studies," yet it is essential in order to understand the problems now confronting scholars who want to understand and make sense of what is happening throughout the world today.

I shall, therefore, not say more about this topic here, but reserve the right to return to it in future work. Mattei Dogan, as indicated above, has taken up some of these issues in his paper on "Internationalization of Sociology" where he says that "social sciences are, by their essence, contextual" (p.4). That does not invalidate their findings -- it only means that their relevance is contextual and needs to be recognized as such. Subsequently, one may proceed to break new ground by expanding the scope of inquiry to new contexts -- and that, of course, is where area specialists can really help those familiar only with a traditional discipline to see how they need to expand and re-shape their theories. Strangely, one effect of such a transformation will be, I expect, that Western scholars will come to understand their own familiar world in a new light. Some insight into this possibility can be gained by looking at the strange phenomenon of American Studies.

The Paradox of American Studies.

On its face, American Studies constitute a form of area studies. The main distinction, from an American point of view, is that it involves introspective analysis of the familiar rather than exploratory inquiry into the strange and unknown. However, there is an historical and contextual distinction that is not transparent and requires a few words of explanation.

Historically, American Studies were born in America well before foreign area studies emerged. However, the goals and scope of this earlier project was very different from the later one, and the two were never commingled -- in fact, even today, American studies is treated, at least in the U.S., as a completely separate entity. Anyone speaking of "area studies" is always thinking about "foreign countries" and never has American studies in mind -- institutionally, the two activities are never linked. Although in both cases multi-disciplinary analysis of conditions found within a geographically defined territory prevails, the theory and practice of these two kinds of area study are not related to each other.

At least, this is true in the United States. Elsewhere, it may well be different. In India, for example, American Studies may be viewed as a form of "area studies" that deals with a foreign country, whereas research on India may be treated separately. In general, from the point of view of any given domain, one may say that "area" studies focus on foreign areas, whereas self-study is treated as a different kind of activity.

The distinction between these two forms of area study in America has a peculiarly American flavor that we should mention here because it also helps us understand the transformation that may well occur under the impact of globalization. The founding disciplines of American Studies in the inter-War years, were History and Literature, and social science apparently had no place in it. The explanation reflects the intellectual dependency of American scholarship on its European context. For American scholars, traditionally, "History" was a Eurocentric narrative which, however, included non-European origins in the "Middle East." America was viewed as a "New World" lying outside the boundaries of real history. Its ancient inhabitants were viewed as without any history, and its significant origins were essentially post-independence. What happened before 1775 was treated as a kind of footnote to authentic American History which began with the Declaration of Independence.

A similar story can be told about American Literature. All serious work on literature focused, essentially, on English literature -- with a side swipe at non-English works under the heading of "Comparative Literature." But what about works in English written in America? They did not truly merit the title of "Literature," nor could they be brought under the rubric of "Comparative." I took a course on "Comparative Literature," taught in 1935 by an American at the University of Nanking: its focus was strictly European, excluding not only American but also, of course, all of Chinese literature. I cannot imagine how my Chinese classmates really understood this anomaly as though their homeland, with its vast literature, did not even exist! My point is that any scholar daring to think about American writings as worthy of literary study had to mark them as "American Literature."

The beginning of "American Studies" in America involved a merger of these two parochialisms: American History married American Literature to constitute "American Studies." As for the political, economic, social, geographic, cultural and linguistic aspects of American life, they were studied separately and unselfconsciously in their separate disciplines. Sociology was essentially the study of American society -- with a preface about the European originators of this discipline, and with no mention of Karl Marx whose writings were simply ignored. Political Science had a parallel focus on American politics, as did Economics, after paying tribute to Adam Smith. The exception was Anthropology, although even here, the focus was on indigenous peoples, especially the "American Indians," a theme that gradually expanded to include indigenous peoples elsewhere.

When Area Studies arose after World War II, its focus was clearly on "foreign" territories -- there was no good reason to link the study of America with studies focused on India, China, Thailand, Nigeria, or Syria. Only later did a tenuous link arise when American studies were redesigned as a vehicle to help foreigners understand Americans and, hopefully, to learn, thereby, how to develop their own democratic and economic institutions. By contrast, the original goal of American studies as History and Literature was, no doubt, to help Americans understand and appreciate their own traditions and accomplishments. In order to help non-Americans understand America, however, it became increasingly important to build the social sciences into the mixture. As a result, American studies have become far more multi-disciplinary than they originally were. Moreover, we may well expect that, increasingly, in every country indigenous scholarship will seek to create a form of local area studies designed to clarify and help solve the problems of their own countries.

The Need for Comparativism.

For any such studies to be truly useful, however, they need to be comparative, and to include foreign partners in a cooperative relationship. Americans often claim that it is silly to study America comparatively because America is unique -- the exceptionalism of the American experience has become a cliche. But how can one know that any country is unique except by comparisons. The Chinese used to see themselves as "civilized" whereas everyone else was barbarian, and Europeans had similar prejudices against non-Europeans. In fact, ethnocentrism is based on ignorance -- the world centers on us, who ever we are, and everyone else is strange and peculiar. Only systematic comparison can overcome this natural bias.

The unconscious bias of area studies is reflected in the history of political research sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, in New York. In the 1950's the Council had a well-funded research committee on "Political Behavior." However, all its projects were based on American political behavior without any felt need for comparisons. Subsequently, when area studies were launched, a parallel committee was created and funded by the Ford Foundation with the misleading title, "Comparative Politics" -- in fact, it was designed to promote research on foreign politics.

Ideally speaking, political behavior is a universal theme that requires comparative analysis. In practice, the first of these SSRC committees was non-comparative and the second, non-American. Americans compartmentalized the study of politics in two unrelated boxes: the first was parochially introspective dealing with American "politics" as though it had a universal relevance. The second was exotic and dealt with foreign politics as peculiarly localized and atypical. The former sought to generalize about politics on the basis of studies in one country alone, whereas the former was doubtful that valid generalizations about "politics" could be based on observations in Thailand, Korea, Pakistan, or Iran because each was to be seen as truly "exceptional." In fact, I strongly believe that American politics can only be understood by comparisons, as I tried to demonstrate in an essay on American Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective (Dogan and Kazancigil, Comparing Nations, Blackwell, 1994. Pp. 72-152).

A concrete illustration of American parochialism can be seen in the contemporary drumbeat of personal attacks against the U.S. president which has preoccupied the American media ever since the political opposition gained a majority in Congress about four years ago. One might have expected some comparativist to step forward and explain that in all industrialized democracies except the United States a parliamentary majority could overthrow the incumbent chief executive by a vote of no-confidence. By contrast, in the U.S., the only constitutional tool available to an opposition majority is the threat of impeachment, essentially an empty threat unless there is strong bi-partisan support for replacing a president who has actually done great wrong. Since an impeached president is replaced by a vice president of the same party -- not an opposition leader -- this procedure cannot help the political opposition. However, the threat of impeachment can hang, like a Damocles sword, over any incumbent and, perhaps, so unnerve or anger him that he will make foolish decisions likely to enhance the opposition's political prospects at the next presidential elections. Whether harassing a president really helps the political opposition is a moot point, but the failure of all American commentators on the current anti-Clinton onslaught to notice this constitutional point or, indeed, of any academicians to explain it, illustrates the essential parochialism and lack of comparative perspective of American studies.

Another relevant distinction has a chronological dimension. Before World War II, Comparative Government was the term given by Americans to political studies centered in the great powers of the world -- that excluded the United States, but included England, France, Germany, Italy, while omitting the smaller European countries. Later, the Soviet Union, Japan, and perhaps Argentina (after Peron) would be added to the list. Each major chapter was essentially an idiographic case study, reporting the institutional history and dynamics of politics in one country.

After the war, the focus of comparative politics shifted to the non-Western world, and monographs on strangely unfamiliar countries became the norm. However, the lack of a genuinely comparative perspective has long hampered the field called Comparative Government. Traditionally, texts in this field were essentially idiographic, containing reports on government in selected countries, as noted above. Any theoretical generalizations they contained often took the form of structural dichotomies, as between monarchies and republics, parliamentary and presidentialist regimes, two-party and multi-party democracies, and Fascist vs. Communist totalitarianism.

Area studies after WWII, however, suddenly revealed a large number of countries with unclassifiable political systems whose institutions were chaotic or incipient and always nondescript. The vogue for functionalism arose in this context. If institutional structures were exceptional and unique in each country, at least certain functions -- communication, socialization, rule-making, environmental adaptation -- could be considered universal, and analysts could focus on describing the wide range of inchoate mechanisms used to perform them. Thus area studies added to our knowledge of previously unknown countries, and buried theories based on the situation in just a few familiar countries, but it failed to generate, I think, truly useful theories of comparative politics that include all countries, not just a few.

Theory based Comparativism.

We have now reached a stage where all the old premises need to be re-examined. The goal of area studies, I think, should be to place the "we" in a comparative perspective that enables us to see how similar or different we are from others and to use that knowledge as a basis for developing both explanatory and prescriptive theories. The more clearly we understand ourselves on the basis of relevant comparisons, the easier it will be to develop theoretical propositions that can be tested and used fruitfully.

However, this cannot be done in isolation by the indigenous scholars of any country. No doubt we have the largest stake and greatest incentive for studying ourselves, but we need the help of others to do so in perspective. Americans in the 19^th century were willing to accept the remarkable insights given them by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, but following the rise of social science in American, they have become arrogantly impatient of input from foreigners. The same principle can apply in any other country. The rising tide of indigenous scholars in every country can and increasingly will establish centers for research on themselves, their own societies, history, culture, languages and literature, geography, politics and economy. To gain perspective, however, they also need help and if foreigners are willing to join them in their efforts at self-understanding, they should be grateful -- everyone stands to gain. Foreign collaborators take back to their homelands the knowledge they have gained abroad, and indigenous scholars learn to understand themselves in a broader, global, perspective.

The flood of foreign graduate students now studying in America and other Western countries provide a great opportunity for world social science if they were to combine research in their host countries with studies of their homelands. Ironically, foreign students in America are usually warned against focusing their doctoral dissertations on American themes -- instead, they are advised to return home to study their own countries. If, despite these warnings, foreign students choose to do research on an American problem, they will be advised later on not to try to teach what they learned in America -- instead, they may be urged to return home where they might join an American Studies program overseas. We are the losers in such situations because having foreign scholars in an American studies program in the U.S. would be one of the best ways to promote greater comparativism in these activities.

To summarize, we now need to create a new global and integrated framework for understanding the contemporary planetary world-system as a macro-context for area studies in which, slicing the pie many different ways, we can identify "areas" to study that are not just states, but also regions, localities, cities, geographic zones, and even global networks of many different kinds. At the same time, we need to re-shape each of the social sciences in a way that retains their values as the context for understanding Western societies, while simultaneously expanding the scope of their concepts and theories to include all of the diverse societies of the non-Western world. This means, to be more concrete, that works on "politics" or "society" can be better understood as works on "American Politics," or "European Societies."

To achieve such a new globalized view of human beings in all their diversity and propensity for cooperation as well as conflict, we need new paradigms that will contextualize, not destroy, all the achievements of the Social Sciences during the recent past. Accolades are, therefore, due to all the great accomplishments of our social scientists provided they are humble enough to recognize the area-specific limitations of their work. Put somewhat differently, the whole world is now a macro-area, and all its regions have become sub-areas. Among these regions can be found the Western countries which should now be analyzed by the same inter-disciplinary methods used in the "area studies" paradigm to look at the Rest of the world.

Summary: An Insider's Perspective

In a recent statement, Willa Tanabe, dean of Asian/Pacific area studies at the University of Hawaii, prepared an analysis that she called Crisis in Area Studies A fitting conclusion to this paper may use the views of an insider in area studies to double-check the perspectives of an outsider that I have offered above. Dean Tanabe called attention to five reasons why area studies have suffered in recent years. I shall summarize her conclusions and check them against my own analysis.

1. A loss of distinctive value. Tanabe points out first, that, increasingly, scholars rooted in a discipline are, in fact, doing area studies. For example, Sociologists who traditionally focused only on American society, or more broadly on Western societies, are now expanding the scope of their inquiries to include many non-Western societies. The same can said of Political Scientists, Economists, Psychologists. As for Anthropologists, their attention has also shifted, but in a reverse direction. Instead of concentrating on primitive communities, they have learned to think of whole countries as a single "culture area," and to feel comfortable studying complex societies.

Moreover, as the emergence of a growing number of hybrid fields reveals, discipline specialists are increasingly multi-disciplinary in their work. No doubt area specialists often hold concurrent appointments in disciplinary departments. The dividing line between area and discipline has grown fuzzy as individuals easily move between the two foci of interest and research. According to Tanabe, area specialists can no longer gain support by claiming to be more "multi-disciplinary" than specialists in any given discipline.

I would agree that disciplines are becoming more multi-disciplinary, as the growth of hybrid fields shows. However, that does not invalidate area specialization. The distinctive feature of an area approach is not that it involves contributions from different disciplines, but rather that it identifies selected parts of the complex world system for more detailed study.

However, we need to overcome the notion that area studies are needed only in "third world" or "underdeveloped" countries. In fact, every part of the world, from the most to the least developed, can be brought under the same kind of microscope for close multi-disciplinary study -- provided, of course, that it is done comparatively, i.e., with a view to understanding how the area under scrutiny relates to or compares with the rest of the world -- both as cause and as effect in the complex interdependencies of our planetary world-system. Area studies should contribute to the disciplines by helping them overcome their parochialism, but area specialists also need the support of professionals in every discipline able to offer tools that can help them understand whatever regional or local part of the world they choose to study.

2. Strategic Value. The second crisis noted by Tanabe involves the loss of "strategic value." Her argument holds that, in its heyday, government planners supported area studies because they expected it would help them prevent or win wars. With the end of the Cold war, she argues, "the strategic justification for area studies has been substantially weakened." Instead, she points out, government agencies, especially the armed forces, run their own technically oriented training programs designed to give their trainees the technical knowhow they need to cope with very specific kinds of international issues and they no longer rely on area studies programs to help them. This problem is specific to area studies in the United States. There used to be a kind of naive expectation in America about the political/strategic value of area studies that was reinforced by the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet system and the weakening of Communist regimes has, indeed, undermined political support for area studies in the United States.

However, area studies need to be understood in a global context. Increasingly, in much of the world, local scholars are able and willing to undertake solid research on their own societies -- most of them have been trained in the West, or in Westernized schools and universities at home. That very training has made them comparativists -- they know that their own countries exist in a world system and they can easily understand how it resembles and differs from other countries. Their problems are due to nationalism more than parochialism -- they are constantly pressed by state and touristic interests as well as patriotism to portray their own societies in glamorous terms.

Of course, the strategic concerns that powered area studies in the past also had perverse consequences for American studies, as noted above. It led to a glamorization of America in the interpretation of American democracy, freedom, and capitalism that was exported to other countries. Conversely, outsiders studying third world countries often put a negative spin on what they observed, offering overly critical assessments of what they saw as strange and even perverse behaviors. Increasingly, we may hope, Westerners will be able to rely on reports from indigenous scholars about the countries they call home, and many of them will also be invited to come as visitors to help the indigenous scholars in their work. Moreover, outsiders can double check the objectivity of their research by inviting insiders to help them evaluate their findings. Meanwhile, as the impact of globalization is increasingly felt in the West, Western scholars will find it necessary to teach about the whole world, and this will impel a continuation of "area studies," though perhaps in a different guise. I fully expect that a new synthesis of both disciplinary and area studies will evolve, perhaps under the heading of "global studies."

3. Patrons and Clients. The third crisis noted by Tanabe involves "confusion regarding their patrons or clients." Commenting on the decline in support from the US government and major foundations, replaced in part by rising support from foreign governments and foundations, Tanabe reports concern about resulting biases. Ideally, she hopes, good scholars will be objective in reporting what exists without "fear or favor," but in reality, have not scholars always tended to be kind to those who support their work?

I recall a world Congress of Anthropologists held some years ago in Vancouver at which a panel of indigenous peoples, in a plenary session, criticized the audience for having worked to sustain exploitation of the peoples they studied. Although some speakers from the audience defended their actions, there were also a few "mea culpa" admissions from members who pointed out that they had obligations to work for those who paid their way. Their solution was to call upon the indigenous communities to raise the money needed to bring ethnographers to their communities and, in effect, to work for them. Is this, perhaps, an inescapable problem?

So long as scholars are not independently wealthy enthusiasts who can study whatever interests them, all those whose livelihood depends on grants and salaries will be subject, to some degree, on the interests of their patrons. However, it strikes me that in the growing environment of globalization, at least some of these biases can be overcome. At least, insofar as local and foreign scholars are brought together as collaborators in teaching and research, some of the inherent bias built into every situation can be overcome. This applies just as forcefully to the utilization of foreign scholars in American studies programs as it may to the employment of Americans in the localized study of their own societies by non-Americans -- and the same, of course, may be said about the English, Dutch, German, Russian, Indian, Brazilian, or Chinese scholars who are concurrently working both at home and abroad.

4. Intellectual Imperialism. A fourth crisis identified by Willa Tanabe involves what she calls "intellectual imperialism."This comment resembles the third but it focuses on intellectual rather than national preconceptions. It is manifest in the form of field work by American and other foreign scholars working in host countries. The point emerges in the design of field work by outsiders working, for example, in India. The kinds of questions they raise, their basic concepts and premises, appear to Indians to be externally designed and irrelevant to local concerns. Indian scholars want to raise questions based on their own premises and problems, but without the necessary financial support, they often find (or found) themselves employed by foreign visitors who were able to employ them provided they would accept and work within the context of the premises, methods, and concepts held by foreign scholars. If, as I hope, our social science disciplines become less parochial and more universal in their concerns, this problem will vanish.

Meanwhile, we should also recognize that indigenous scholars have themselves been so conditioned by their studies abroad that they themselves often try to formulate issues in terms more suitable to a Western environment than to their own. I recall extended discussions with a very able graduate student from Nepal who wanted to interpret the problems of her country in terms of "class" conflict, yet the excellent data she offered seemed to me to relate more to caste-like than to class-like conditions. Although caste and class no doubt resemble each other in some respects, the differences are so important that the attempt to see Nepali conditions in terms of class relations struck me as highly misleading. Increasingly, I think, the development of experienced indigenous social scientists will rectify this kind of intellectual distortion, and foreign visitors will also learn to adapt their own perceptions to the insights of their host colleagues. No doubt, intellectual imperialism will persist, but I feel that this is a self-correcting problem that will diminish as globalization advances.

5. Globalization. The fifth crisis, in the Tanabe catalog, focuses directly on globalization. She correctly talks about the impact of global forces -- migrations, technological and, environmental transformations, external influences ranging from health to culture -- all these, she notes, mask what was originally there and what was once merely local but now become far more widely dispersed. "Area studies," she concludes, "must cross borders to remain relevant... Cooperative ventures must become a hallmark of area studies." Cooperation refers here both to collaboration among scholars rooted in different disciplines and coming from different countries and cultures.

To some extent we can assume that this will happen spontaneously: both traditional disciplines and conventional area studies will be replaced by a new kind of global studies that encompasses and links both of these older orientations. However, this is not the kind of transformation that will occur automatically -- it will happen only as individuals and institutions, conscious of the problems outlined above, join forces to bring about the changes needed to put area studies into a global context. Hopefully, this essay can be a contribution toward this end.

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Updated: 25 July 1998

See linked pages: [] Comments on the meanings of "globalization" || Draft Glossary for concepts of globalizaton || Links to other Files and || Web Sites on globalization. []

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