Area Studies at the Crossroads Katja Mielke • Anna-Katharina Hornidge Editors Area Studies at the Crossroads

Area Studies at the Crossroads Katja Mielke • Anna-Katharina Hornidge Editors Area Studies at the Crossroads Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn Editors Katja Mielke Anna-Katharina Hornidge Bonn International Center for Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Conversion (BICC) Research (ZMT) & University of Bonn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany Bremen Institute of Sociology Bremen, Germany ISBN 978-1-349-95011-9 ISBN 978-1-137-59834-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59834-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930497 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Plrang GFX / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. FOREWORD: A THIRD WaVE Of AREa StUDIEs Area Studies is an enduring source of fascination. Firstly there are places and intersecting areas to reckon with. With them come languages, literature, nature, cuisine and cultures. And there are also political economies, ecologies, and media. Secondly, there is always something new to think about, for Area Studies cuts across multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Area Studies at the Crossroads bears witness to this cross-disciplinary allure and the enthrallment of working in and through areas. This book also marks a coming of age of what might be conceptual- ized as a third wave in Area Studies. To be sure, the history of different strands of Area Studies varies in their details. Accordingly in the 1960s and 1970s, Southeast Asian Studies was deeply shaped by critical reactions to the Vietnam War and Latin American Studies affected more by radical economic and social ideas than say Slavic Studies or South Asian Studies, which were less caught-up in the tumult. But if we step back and consider Area Studies in a “global” sense (in the old fashioned sense of that word as encompassing the whole of things), the fortunes of its constituents all tend to reflect the changes in the status of Area Studies as a whole. There may have been precursors in classics, philology, and theology, but historically, the first incarnation of Area Studies conscious of itself as a systematic set of sciences coincided with the long nineteenth century’s consolidation of European empires and the stirrings of American and Japanese ones. These were in broad competition with each other and the Romanovs, and most operated at the expense of the declining Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid and Qing empires. Like the British in the century before, v vi FOREWORD: A THIRD WAVE OF AREA STUDIES Portugal and Spain lost ground in the Americas, but out of the debris rose a stronger commitment to African empire among the Portuguese and an intense debate about Spain’s role in the world (the intellectual and political currents known in Spain as the generation of 1898), as well as revanchist British imperialism in Asia and Africa. What we might therefore call the first wave of Area Studies saw a proliferation of scholarly centers and learned societies across Europe, usually with close ties to imperial administration. It was served too by emergent modern disciplines, notably anthropology, archaeology, geography, and sciences like tropical medicine and linguistics. The second wave arrived around the mid-twentieth century. Unsurprisingly its leaders, norms, structures and parameters were American. This was the highpoint of Area Studies. It tends now to be seen as a golden age, in terms of funding largesse from rich foundations and bulging state coffers. But equally, it has come to be viewed suspiciously by those critical of its Cold War and universalizing underpinnings. The third wave is conspicuously post-Cold War. As in the chapters that follow here, this reworking of Area Studies displays influences from social and cultural theory, and registers geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts that are yielding a more multipolar world. It is also wrought by other social and political forces (themselves represented as having experienced third waves): democracy, feminism and technology. Each wave, with respect to the one before it, developed in a historical epoch associated with reconfig- urations of space, time and scholarship; the first marked by thenovelty of the telegraph and powered shipping, the second by television and aircraft, and the third by the internet and digitization. The transitions between each wave of Area Studies were marked by contention and a sense of loss of mission or crisis. Hence the end of European empires saw a critique of the gazetteer-style of description that had accompanied exploration and formed the archive of colonial gover- nance. Instead, there was a demand for more analytical Area Studies. The rise of Development Studies and the impacts of modernization theory, as well as a shift from “race” to culture as an explanatory variable inaugu- rated the second wave. Critiques accumulated from the 1970s however, pointing to continuity in the ways that many of Area Studies’ mid-twentieth century categories and assumptions were still rooted in the colonial discourses of its forerunner. As a master’s student in late 1980s England, I recall a slightly older and more traveled (hence in my mind, a wiser) friend knowingly advising me to avoid taking classes from any professor who FOREWORD: A THIRD WAVE OF AREA STUDIES vii called themselves an Orientalist. At graduate school we all read Edward Said’s Orientalism. Then came the end of the Cold War. Areas seemed passé. Globalization was the talk of the town. It has taken a couple of decades for the third wave to come of age. Many of the critiques leveled at its predecessors are still in the air, for Orientalism was back on active service after 9/11 and the legacy of the Cold War divi- sion of intellectual labor and areas lingered, although they looked increasingly arbitrary. But fresh approaches have been celebrated, foregrounding connections while challenging Eurocentric assumptions about their geography and histories. The secondary literature on Edward Said is now much larger than his work and postcolonial theory has most likely become more influential than what remains of theories of modernization or dependency. Alternative demarcations of areas are increasingly evident too, as exempli- fied by the debates about the Black Atlantic and the value of concepts like Zomia or oceanspaces. And other areas, which had been partitioned by the Cold War into adjuncts of Soviet or Middle Eastern Studies have seen their legibility remerge in the form of the Persianate and Turkic worlds. In short, this book is very timely. And if, as I believe it will, Area Studies at the Crossroads encourages more scholars to join these ongoing conver- sations or broadens and deepens debate among those who are already part of them, it will have commendably served its purpose. James D. Sidaway Department of Geography National University of Singapore Singapore ACKNOWLEDGEMENts We would like to express our utmost gratitude to several anonymous reviewers, our colleagues from Crossroads Asia for acting as discussion partners over the past three years and Christoph Blumert for his tremen- dous support in preparing this volume. Finally, we thank the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany for the financial and proj- ect support that made this work possible. ix CONtENts Part I Area Studies at the Crossroads 1 Introduction: Knowledge Production, Area Studies and the Mobility Turn 3 Katja Mielke and Anna-Katharina Hornidge The Neoliberal University and Global Immobilities of Theory 27 Peter A. Jackson Part II To Be or Not to Be Is Not the Question. Rethinking Area Studies in Its Own Right 45 Doing Area Studies in the Americas and Beyond: Towards Reciprocal Methodologies and the Decolonization of Knowledge 47 Olaf Kaltmeier Area Studies @ Southeast Asia: Alternative Areas versus Alternatives to Areas 65 Christoph Antweiler xi xii Contents Between Ignoring and Romanticizing: The Position of Area Studies in Policy Advice 83 Conrad Schetter Part III Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn 101 Positionality and the Relational Production of Place in the Context of Student Migration to Gilgit, Pakistan 103 Andreas

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