Area Studies

Also found in: Wikipedia.

Area Studies


a geographical science involving the comprehensive study of continents, countries, and large regions. Area studies demonstrates how the general lawlike regularities and typological features stemming from physical and economic geography are manifested in specific individual areas.

Area studies is one of the oldest branches of geography, emerging in the classical world out of the practical need for knowledge about various countries. For several millennia, since the time of Herodotus and Strabo, it has been universal in character, encompassing all aspects of nature, history, demography, economics, culture, and politics. As science has moved forward, especially in the 20th century, the systematic geographical sciences have grown rapidly, and their synthesizing elements have become more prominent. Concomitantly, the scientific level of area studies has been raised. In addition, physical geography and economic geography have gone their separate ways, so that Soviet literature on area studies has moved in two different directions, namely, toward an economic emphasis and toward a physical emphasis. Both tendencies take as their starting point the difference in the regularities characteristic of nature and society and in the fundamental incompatibility of natural and economic regionalization groupings (divisions of regions on the basis of both natural and economic features). In contrast, bourgeois geographers often disregard the fundamental differences between physicogeographical and economic-geographical regions.

The growing practical significance of area studies and its role in ideological education and cultural improvement have led, in the USSR, to the founding of comprehensive Marxist-Leninist area studies, in which elements of nature and society are examined from the viewpoint of social interests.

The Soviet geographer N. N. Baranskii played a great role in the growth of Soviet area studies, making a significant contribution to methodology and problem formulation. He distinguished two approaches to area studies: (1) “Area studies, by no means a special science, should be only an organizational form for bringing together varied information about a given country” (Ekonomicheskaia geografiia, Ekonomicheskaia kartografiia, 1960, p. 157); (2) Comprehensive area studies is one of the scientific disciplines that together form the system of geographical sciences; it is an important and indispensable part of this system.

The second approach is linked with the emergence of problem-oriented area studies, which is based less on an area’s “com-ponential” description and more on the key problems that shape the current status and developmental perspectives of the regional production structure of the economy and settlement pattern, as well as the fundamental features determining the use of natural and labor resources, the production base and the region as the scientific and technological revolution moves forward and as society and the environment enter into an increasingly complex interaction.


Baranskii, N. N. Ekonomicheskaia geografiia, Ekonomicheskaia kartografiia, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1960.
Gokhman, V. M., and G. M. Ignat’ev. “Stranovedenie.” In the collection Sovetskaia geografiia. Moscow, 1960.
Pokshishevskii, V. V. ‘“Mesto ekonomiko-geograficheskogo stranovedeniia v sisteme geograficheskikh nauk.” Izv. AN SSSR: Ser. geogr., 1960, no. 5.


References in periodicals archive ?
In this too, there might be something gained by plunging into new areas, leaving a disciplinary comfort zone, with familiar literatures, paradigms and people, to think, present and publish comparatively, venturing into reconfigured area studies communities or across disciplines, where we are in less secure territory.
The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program provides grants to colleges and universities to fund individual doctoral students to conduct research in other countries in modern foreign languages and area studies for periods of six to 12 months.
regions, issues and paradigms in the disciplines of Area Studies in her paper.
To keep academic librarians from going collectively mad, this collection of essays addresses specific issues in a range of area studies, giving acquisition channels and methods, software and net resources, selection tools, and ways of collecting such special materials as bibliographies.
Department of Education's International Education Programs Service (IEPS) provides grants to support overseas projects in training, research, and curriculum development in modern foreign languages and area studies for teachers, students, and faculty engaged in a common endeavor.
Why must one choose between area studies and the discipline?
Salwa Ismail is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Developing Area Studies, McGill University, Montreal.
in economics and German area studies from Tufts University and a M.
Geographers and others have recently addressed the problematic of area studies by suggesting alternate ways to recognize the connectedness of peoples and places.
The purpose of the program is to improve and strengthen instruction in modern foreign languages, area studies and other international fields.
Turkey) are based on talks delivered at an international symposium organized by the Islamic Area Studies Project and the Japanese government and titled "The Dynamism of Muslim Societies: Toward New Horizons in Islamic Area Studies.
Nothing has demonstrated the "context sensitivity" of organized science more dramatically than the impact of the end of the Cold War on budgets for area studies in America.