While area studies had been taught at the Seminar for Oriental Languages of the Friedrich-Wilhelm University Berlin (now Humboldt-University) since 1887, interdisciplinary area studies became increasingly common in the United States and in Western scholarship after World War II. Before that war American universities had just a few faculty who taught or conducted research on the non-Western world. Foreign-area studies were virtually nonexistent. After the war, liberals and conservatives alike were concerned about the U.S. ability to respond effectively to perceived external threats from the Soviet Union and China in the context of the emerging Cold War, as well as to the fall-out from the decolonization of Africa and Asia.[citation needed]
In this context, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York convened a series of meetings producing a broad consensus that to address this knowledge deficit, the U.S. must invest in international studies.[citation needed] Participants argued that a large brain trust of internationally oriented political scientists and economists was an urgent national priority. There was a central tension, however, between those who felt strongly that, instead of applying Western models, social scientists should develop culturally and historically contextualized knowledge of various parts of the world by working closely with humanists, and those who thought social scientists should seek to develop overarching macrohistorial theories that could draw connections between patterns of change and development across different geographies. The former became area-studies advocates, the latter proponents of modernization theory.
The Ford Foundation would eventually become the dominant player in shaping the area studies program in the U.S.[4] In 1950, the foundation established the prestigious Foreign Area Fellowship Program (FAFP), the first large-scale national competition in support of area-studies training in the U.S. From 1953 to 1966, it contributed $270 million to 34 universities for area and language studies. Also during this period, it poured millions of dollars into the committees run jointly by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies for field-development workshops, conferences, and publication programs.[5] Eventually, the SSRC-ACLS joint committees would take over the administration of FAFP.
Other large and important programs followed Ford's. Most notably, the National Defense Education Act of 1957, renamed the Higher Education Act in 1965, allocated funding for some 125 university-based area-studies units known as National Resource Center programs at U.S. universities, as well as for Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarships for undergraduate students and fellowships for graduate students.
Meanwhile, area studies were also developed in the Soviet Union.[6]
Controversy within the field
Since their inception, area studies have been subject to criticism—including by area specialists themselves. Many of them alleged that because area studies were connected to the Cold War agendas of the CIA, the FBI, and other intelligence and military agencies, participating in such programs was tantamount to serving as an agent of the state.[7] Some argue that there is the notion that U.S. concerns and research priorities will define the intellectual terrain of area studies.[8] Others insisted, however, that once they were established on university campuses, area studies began to encompass a much broader and deeper intellectual agenda than the one foreseen by government agencies, thus not American centric.[9]
Arguably, one of the greatest threats to the area studies project was the rise of rational choice theory in political science and economics.[10] To mock one of the most outspoken rational choice theory critics, Japan scholar Chalmers Johnson asked: Why do you need to know Japanese or anything about Japan's history and culture if the methods of rational choice will explain why Japanese politicians and bureaucrats do the things they do?[11]
Following the demise of the Soviet Union, philanthropic foundations and scientific bureaucracies moved to attenuate their support for area studies, emphasizing instead interregional themes like "development and democracy". When the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, which had long served as the national nexus for raising and administering funds for area studies, underwent their first major restructuring in thirty years, closing down their area committees, scholars interpreted this as a massive signal about the changing research environment.[7]
^Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 178.
^David L. Szanton, "The Origin, Nature and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States", in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton (University of California Press, 2004), pp. 10–11.
^Rupprecht, Tobias (2015). "5: Desk revolutionaries: Soviet Latin Americanists and internationalism in the late Soviet Union". Soviet Internationalism after Stalin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 273. ISBN9781107102880. Retrieved 2017-08-22. Academics from Moscow State University and IMEMO [founded in 1956] often turned to broader area studies at the ILA [the Institute of Latin America (founded in 1961 as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences)] and taught at MGIMO [founded in 1944], Moscow State University or Lumumba University [established in 1960]. Others moved from area studies into international journalism. [...] All state and Party organs that dealt with cultural diplomacy drew on the staff of area studies and their network of contacts.
^See "Rational Choice Theory", by John Scott, in Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of The Present, edited by G. Browning, A. Halcli, and F. Webster (Sage Publications, 2000). "Rational Choice Theory". Archived from the original on 2009-02-27. Retrieved 2008-07-30.. Retrieved 2009-04-23.
^See Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, "A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies", The National Interest 36 (summer 1994), pp. 14–22.
