Area Studies: Abuses and Uses

The study of “cultural zones” or « aires culturelles », the French semi-equivalent of « area studies », is said to favour interdisciplinary work and to strengthen social science research on parts of the world other than those from which these sciences historically emerged. In practice and in principle, though, advances in interdisciplinary research and in our understanding of the world at large are in many ways unrelated to a focus on cultural zones impossible to define. The notion of “aires culturelles” (and its institutionalization in the academy) only advances such research and knowledge if it grounds interdisciplinarity on methodological and theoretical debates that animate the disciplines and if it abandons culture as a necessarily independent variable that by implication complicates and even prevents comparison.