The Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe Volume 6 • Number 1 • Spring/Summer 2006 Whither the Area in Area Studies? How Students Teach Us to Rethink the Boundaries of Eastern Europe Katherine Metzo University of North Carolina–Charlotte Jennifer Cash University of Pittsburgh Abstract The authors examine the state of the ield of Russian and East European area studies by bringing student perspec- tives into dialogue with leading scholarly perspectives on the direction of area studies. They argue that the collapse of communism and increasing globalization do not necessitate the elimination of area studies. Instead, area studies helps to contextualize the shared histories and experiences of neighboring states as well as local particularities within the increasing integration of Europe. [Keywords: area studies, globalization, post-socialism, graduate studies] it can be studied (Asad 1973, Cliford 1998, Nash 1975, Stocking 1992), such that anthropologists now recognize the signiicant ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges involved in undertaking ield-based studies. For anthropology, the conditions of the ield’s validity are constructed anew with each study and monograph (Geertz 1988, Stocking 1992:372). In Russian and East European area studies, it is the “area” that has been destabilized— irst by the collapse of communism and state socialism, and increasingly by NATO alliances, the expansion of the European Union, and a myriad of processes related to “globalization.” Under these new social, political, and economic conditions, the “East” part of Europe is no longer easily deined, and its relation to Russia is also far less certain. In both crises, we see evidence of the problems caused by what Martin and Wigen (1997) refer to as a “myth of geographical concordance”—the assumption that geo- graphical boundaries (including continents, states, and compass directions) relect real patterns of economic, social, political, cultural, and religious diferences. All geographical boundaries rest on historically contingent ideologies, but (American) society and academia both habitually and systemically misrecognize this fact. Within the academy, each discipline thus pursues the primary task of reining the understanding of commonalities that lie within each form of boundary without challenging the boundaries themselves. 3 he destabilization of Eastern Europe as a conceptual region thus presents a challenge and opportunity to recon- igure not only the ield of Russian and East European area studies, but also the implication of geographic “areas” in broader patterns of knowledge about the world and the social and political behaviors motivated and justiied by this “knowledge.” Students are instrumental in this process because they bring the state of ever-changing “common knowledge” about the world to our attention. As dem- onstrated in the following pages, our eforts to engage students with the problem of deining Eastern Europe resulted in new models for interdisciplinary inquiry that seek to adequately capture the complex interplay of history, politics, economics, memory and identity at local, state, regional, and global levels. Since 1989, increasing numbers of Western-trained anthropologists have conducted ieldwork in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. 1 As with the wider anthropology of Europe, the signiicance of the anthropol- ogy of Eastern Europe has been slow to enter mainstream anthropological discussions (Cole 1977, Kideckel 1998). he signiicance of anthropology to Russian and East Euro- pean area studies, however, has been taken up much more quickly and loudly (Hemment 2005, Ries 2005, Verdery 2005). Indeed, anthropologists can ofer valuable perspec- tives gleaned from our work “on the ground,” but anthro- pology has more to ofer area studies than a record of local voices and lived realities. In this article, we propose that area studies also stands to gain from incorporating anthro- pological methods in the classroom. 2 Speciically, we argue that students constitute an important type of “informant” for any discipline, and especially for disciplines, like area studies and anthropology, which classify and study major patterns of human activity in the world. To date, specialists in Russian and East European area studies have not drawn a parallel between the “crisis” of their ield in the 1990s and the longer-term “crisis” in anthropology that began as early as the 1960s. Yet in both cases, a disciplinary “crisis” followed the destabilization of a key concept brought about by major social, politi- cal, and economic processes. In anthropology, decolo- nialism, modernization, and increased migration has severely challenged the deinition of “culture” and how