Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Waves of subaltern, colonial, postcolonial, and critical race studies have posed an undeniable challenge to the normative geopolitical bent of area studies, and yet the same challenges are rarely taken up within media studies. Media studies reach a similar impasse when it comes to dealing with geopolitical forms and functions, stressing the dynamism of media and the passivity, historical immutability, and cultural inertness of regions. This article reconsiders the impasses of both area studies and media studies to propose an alternative approach to the region-platform relation: platformativity. The notion of platformativity is intended to address the infra-individual intra-actions between platform and human, and individual and collective – a kind of performativity via platforms. It considers how media infrastructures operate alongside and through national and regional forms to generate signaletic modes of existence that function as relays between disciplinary, sovereign, and biopolitical formations.

Area studies undertaken without sound knowledge of 'the entire body of established ways of the inhabitants of the area' must be looked upon with considerable reservation. Anthropology provides the area researcher with both concept and method. The concept of culture is involved as embodying 'a series of limits to sanctioned variation, rather than a single approved mode of thought and conduct.' Aspects of culture (economic, political, social, religious, aesthetic, etc.) represent responses to geographical and biopsychic needs of man. Such aspects represent cultural universals, unities which characterize all human groups. Through a knowledge of the culture learning process we may gain psychological insights important in the action programs of area studies. Such problems as acceptance of new forms of technology, political organization, etc., may be handled by an analysis of enculturative experience. The primary methodological contribution of cultural anthropoloty to area studies lies in the relativistic approach. Hence, cultural anthropology `because of the breadth of its conceptual system and the techniques of cross-cultural analysis has come to act as the integrating element in interdisciplinary area research and teaching. R. J. Murphy.

Turning 50 years of age allows for a retrospective look at the German Association for Asian Studies' (DGA) trajectory over the last few decades. The article addresses the issue of Asia as the focal area for members of the DGA, the relationship between Area Studies and other (Social Science) disciplines, and the structural contexts to which both the DGA and its member community of scholars have adjusted their work — both willingly but also at times unwillingly too, because political conditions afforded a particular response. Through reflecting on Asia as an "entity" of scholarly endeavor, but also as a part of the globe having particular unique features and traits, the article discusses how Asian Area Studies have developed over time and to what extent the exercise of scholarly analysis has been shaped by changing paradigms such as the demand to "study with" people in Asia instead of performing the "study of" them. The DGA has been affected by such trends as well. On the whole, the assessment of the past five decades is a mixed and critical one, leading to the conclusion that the DGA can, in future, set the agenda for research on Asia that is both open to new perspectives and capable of integrating the ever more diverse community that its members make up. (Asien/GIGA)

In this paper we address the question of 'what next after poststructuralism' through a reassessment of area studies. In a narrative of our own involvement with place-oriented research and institutions, we examine the traditional position of area studies in geography and anthropology and its reevaluation by poststructuralist scholars in a number of disciplines. We argue that both prestructuralist and poststructuralist treatments of areas are oriented by a narrative of capitalist development; at the same time, we recognize that traditional area studies has a deep interest in noncapitalist economic practices and relations. It is therefore a resource for those of us who want to create a discourse of economic diversity as a contribution to a politics of economic innovation. The latter half of the paper presents an extended example of reading for economic difference drawn from fieldwork in the oil-palm sector in Papua New Guinea. We conclude with a 'post-poststructuralist' reflection on geographic field research. From our evolving perspective, the fieldwork practices that are the principal research methods of area studies constitute a relatively untheorized form of academic politics, creating differences in thought (and thus in the world) via new interpenetrations of concepts and 'matter'.

In this paper we address the question of 'what next after poststructuralism' through a reassessment of area studies. In a narrative of our own involvement with place-oriented research and institutions, we examine the traditional position of area studies in geography and anthropology and its reevaluation by poststructuralist scholars in a number of disciplines. We argue that both prestructuralist and poststructuralist treatments of areas are oriented by a narrative of capitalist development; at the same time, we recognize that traditional area studies has a deep interest in noncapitalist economic practices and relations. It is therefore a resource for those of us who want to create a discourse of economic diversity as a contribution to a politics of economic innovation. The latter half of the paper presents an extended example of reading for economic difference drawn from fieldwork in the oil-palm sector in Papua New Guinea. We conclude with a 'post-poststructuralist' reflection on geographic field research. From our evolving perspective, the fieldwork practices that are the principal research methods of area studies constitute a relatively untheorized form of academic politics, creating differences in thought (and thus in the world) via new interpenetrations of concepts and 'matter'.

Tagung im Rahmen des Forschungsverbundes "Wege des Wissens. Transregionale Studien" am Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, in Kooperation mit der VolkswagenStiftung, 14.07.-16.07.2005, Max-Liebermann-Haus, Berlin.

Comparative Area Studies (CAS) promises to bring together the method of focused qualitative comparison and a sensitivity to area context in multiple world regions. Ariel Ahram, Patrick Köllner, and Rudra Sil's Comparative Area Studies (2018), for example, provides a wonderful overview of how comparativists can learn from what might seem to be audacious crossregional comparative projects. What could be more interesting than insisting that we read more European political history to make better sense of the case of the United States (Ahmed 2018) or identifying the "Arab" Spring in Israel and Mali (Ahram 2018)? I suspect that for many comparative social scientists, the very idea of learning about something familiar by comparing it with something very different is what attracted us to our field in the first place.