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1.0 Area StudiesGuiding questi on: What makes an area?
Five ways of making an area (area-making):
1. Language (discursive area-making);
2. Living somewhere and making the space one’s own (inhabitative area-making);
3. Moving around, in, and between the spaces, circulating (in transit area-making;
4. Telling stories about it (history, myths, legends);
5. Exerting power over it.
How areas are made
Understand and use the language of area studies:
- Essential terms, concepts;
- Themes of discussion and research;
- Questions, issues.
Together they make a ‘language’.
Area studies as a meta-discipline:
- Employs ‘the language of area studies’;
- Takes into account perspectivism;
- Takes different (often local) ways of thinking about and studying areas and related
matters seriously.
, 1.1 Making an area through language: Practices
1.1.1. “Disciplines” vs. Area Studies (esp. in the USA)
Disciplines:
Disciplines are scholarly approaches to a problem area that share a common object of study,
common questions about that object, an intellectual genealogy, theories.
This contrasts fundamentally with the setup of area studies: which is of course concentrated
on areas, parts of the world (world regions, countries, area-based civilizations), and
primarily on the people living there.
Area studies are therefore multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or even a disciplinary.
Working definition of area studies:
Trans-, multi- or a-disciplinary study of areas (to be defined later), and especially of people
in areas.
1.1.2. Language and ‘area’
One fundamental way of making an area is by calling something an area, to represent it as
an area (through language).
You may have heard of performative use of language (as opposed to denotative use of
language); e.g. “I pronounce you husband and wife”.
But to a certain extent all language is performative: it helps you to see something in a
certain way.
Other factors certainly play a role as well (terrain/geography, history, population), but a
fundamental way of area-making is through language.
A working definition of ‘area’
If one examines the way ordinary people (and scholars) use these kinds of words which
mean, approximately, ‘area’, the following features turn out to be central.
An area:
- is a space with a centre (core, heart) and/or borders
- Has properties, characteristics, some kind of identity
- is subject to power or ownership or jurisdiction: some form of control
(The latter is really about ‘territory’, but ...)
Note that the geometrics of areas may vary not all areas have, or used to have, clear-cut
borders; instead (or in addition) they may have centres, even be polycentric!
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