The Presidential Address: An Action Agenda for Area Studies

Extract

Many of you will have heard of the Social Science Research Council's Language and Area Studies Review. In fact many of you filled in one or more of its tedious questionnaires. Unfortunately, it has been caught up in the debate about the relative merits of various size-classes of language and area studies centers, a debate set in motion by withdrawal of Federal support from half of the NDEA VI centers. As a consequence, many of the problems brought out by the data contained in that report have not yet been faced, and no agenda for collective action in our field has been agreed upon. I do not wish to repeat all of these data and conclusions here, but only draw out a few of the features more relevant to the general development of area studies, and add a few events that have occurred since that survey was conducted.