All Area & Cultural Studies

The thing about culture is that there’s certainly a lot of it. It’s far from unusual in my neighborhood to hear different accents or even languages on the street. In France, a country that’s often mistaken to have a fairly unified culture, not only French but also Basque, Corsican, Germanic dialects, Occitan, and a smattering of other indigenous languages are spoken.​Something similar is true of most regions in the world. This means that their cultures are as much a part of the modern, interconnected world as fiber-optic cables. Ideally, each civilization has to be understood and interacted with on its own merits and without offending its own customs.​With some societies generating friction between them, and others being dislocated and plowed under new economic systems, area and cultural studies are as important today as they have ever been.