Central Asian studies

Central Asian studies is the discipline of studying the culture, history, and languages of Central Asia. The roots of Central Asian studies as a social science discipline goes to 19th century Anglo-Russian Great Game. During 19th century, Central Asia became a subject of systematical information collection and organization thanks to the numerous travels made by British and Russian agents, soldiers, scholars into the region. The British Royal Geographical Society and Russian Geographical Society published dozens even hundreds of travel books on the region.

Contemporary Central Asian studies have been developed by pioneers such as Nicholas Poppe, Denis Sinor, Ilse Laude-Cirtautas, Alexandre Bennigsen, Edward Allworth, Yuri Bregel and Hasan Bulent Paksoy among others. Several American research universities have programs on Central Asia. The Mongolian and Altaic Studies Program within the Far Eastern and Russian Institute at the University of Washington (UW), established under Poppe's direction in 1949, became an early prototype of Central Asian Studies. The Central Asian Studies Program, later formed by Cirtautas in 1968 at the UW, and the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University have been the leading research and teaching programs. Many scholars involved in Central Asia studies belong to the Central Eurasian Studies Society.

Central Asia

Central Asia is the core region of the Asian continent and stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. It is also sometimes referred to as Middle Asia, and, colloquially, "the 'stans" (as the six countries generally considered to be within the region all have names ending with the Persian suffix "-stan", meaning "land of") and is within the scope of the wider Eurasian continent.

In modern contexts, all definitions of Central Asia include these five republics of the former Soviet Union: Kazakhstan (pop. 17 million), Kyrgyzstan (5.7 million), Tajikistan (8.0 million), Turkmenistan (5.2 million), and Uzbekistan (30 million), for a total population of about 66 million as of 2013–2014. Afghanistan (pop. 31.1 million) is also sometimes included.

Various definitions of Central Asia's exact composition exist, and not one definition is universally accepted. Despite this uncertainty in defining borders, the region does have some important overall characteristics. For one, Central Asia has historically been closely tied to its nomadic peoples and the Silk Road. As a result, it has acted as a crossroads for the movement of people, goods, and ideas between Europe, Western Asia, South Asia, and East Asia.

Asian studies

Asian studies, a term used usually in North America for Oriental studies and is concerned with the Asian people, their cultures, languages, history and politics. Within the Asian sphere, Asian studies combines aspects of sociology, history, cultural anthropology and many other disciplines to study political, cultural and economic phenomena in Asian traditional and contemporary societies. Asian studies forms a field of post-graduate study in many universities.

It is a branch of area studies, and many Western universities combine Asian and African studies in a single faculty or institute, like SOAS in London. It is often combined with Islamic studies in a similar way. The history of the discipline in the West is covered under Oriental studies.

Branches