The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines

This volume argues that the fundamental role of Area Studies in the United States has been -and continues to be -to deparochialize US-and Euro-centric visions of the world in the core social science and humanities disciplines, among policy makers, and in the public at large.Within the US university, Area Studies scholarship attempts to document the existence, internal logic, and theoretical implications of the distinctive social and cultural values, expressions, structures, and dynamics that shape the societies and nations beyond Europe and the United States.The broad goals are twofold.One, to generate new knowledge and new forms of knowledge for their intrinsic and practical value.Two, and more reflexively, to historicize and contextualize -in effect, to de-naturalize -the formulations and universalizing tendencies of the US social science and humanities disciplines which continue to draw largely on US and European experience.When successful, Area Studies research and teaching demonstrates the limitations of fashioning analyses based largely on the particular and contingent histories, structures, power formations, and selective, and often idealized, narratives of "the West."Still more ambitiously, Area Studies can provide the materials and ideas to help reconstruct the disciplines so that they become more inclusive and more effective tools for social and cultural analysis.Area Studies communities have not always succeeded in this; there have been many failures, and other agendas as well.As an intellectual movement, Area Studies has been heterogeneous and itself must be historicised, contextualized, and continually reconstructed to meet the changing dynamics of the world.But the deparochialization of the US social sciences and humanities has been a central concern from the beginning.1 Furthermore, given post-1989 Western triumphalism, intertwined with current processes and claims of economic, social and cultural "globalization," reinvigorating and recasting Area Studies to meet its original goal of translating back to us the continuing diversities of the world is an ever more complex and challenging intellectual and political enterprise.Within the universities of the United States Area Studies represents a major social invention.Area Studies research and teaching on Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union has repeatedly challenged the institutional and the intellectual hegemony of the US and Euro-centric social science and humanities disciplines.By generating new kinds of data, questions, and insights into social formations, political dynamics, and cultural constructions (e.g.Anderson's "Imagined Communities," The Rudolphs' "Modernity of Tradition," Geertz' "Theatre State," O'Donnell's "Bureaucratic Authoritarianism", Scott's "Weapons of the Weak" Turner's "Liminal Spaces"), Area Studies scholars have frequently undermined received wisdom and established theories, replacing them with more context sensitive formulations.By creating new interdisciplinary academic programs, and developing close collaborations with colleagues overseas rooted in different national and intellectual cultures, Area Studies scholars press the social science and humanities disciplines in the US to look beyond, even sometimes recast unstated presumptions and easy interpretations.At times the challenges to the disciplines have often involved sharp intellectual, institutional, and political struggles.Despite, or perhaps because of, its successes, tensions between Area Studies and certain disciplines continue over intellectual issues, economic resources, and the structure of academic programs.The debates over the appropriate content and organization of internationally oriented university-based teaching and research rise and fall, and never quite seem to be resolved, though over time they do shift ground.To complicate matters, the individual Area Studies fields are neither internally homogeneous, nor are they similar to each other.Indeed examined up close, they are strikingly distinctive in their political, institutional, and intellectual histories, and in their relationships with the disciplines.This volume then is an effort to illuminate the divergent trajectories, agendas, strengths, and weaknesses of the individual fields in order to provide a concrete sense of their intellectual substance, a framework for defining their contributions, limits, and relations to the core disciplines (themselves changing over time), and a fresh basis for thinking about --even attempting to shape --where Area Studies might be headed.As the nine chapters that follow suggest, "Area Studies" is best understood as a cover term for a family of academic fields and activities joined by a common commitment to: (1) intensive language study; (2) in-depth field research in the local language(s); (3) close attention to local histories, viewpoints, materials, and interpretations; (4) testing, elaborating, critiquing, or developing grounded theory against detailed observation; and (5) multi-disciplinary conversations often crossing the boundaries of the social sciences and humanities.Most Area Studies scholars concentrate their own research and teaching on one or a number of related countries, but generally try to contextualize their efforts in large regions of the world (e.g., Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia), beyond the US and Western Europe.Scholars working on the three one-country Area Studies fields (China, Japan, and Korea), often engage in at least implicit comparisons among them, and often command literatures in languages from two or more of these countries.2 As the essays will demonstrate, the boundaries of the Area Studies fieldsand especially the African, East European, Soviet, and Southeast Asian fields -are historically contingent, pragmatic, and highly contestable.The conventional boundaries have often been intellectually generative, but they clearly have limits as well.Always controversial for the challenges it poses to the disciplines, recently Area Studies has itself been challenged from various directions as a vestigial remnant of the Cold War, as politically tainted, as a-theoretical exotica, or as increasingly irrelevant in the face of hegemonic and homogenizing globalization and transnational forces.This volume responds to and rejects these charges by laying out the divergent and productive intellectual and institutional trajectories of the major fields over the last several decades, and many of the most significant debates in and around them.The nine essays that follow --on the African, Chinese, Eastern European, Japanese, Latin American, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and the Soviet studies fields 3 --are varied in approach and style.The authors were selected for their interest in and knowledge of the intellectual history of their own specific area studies field, and were charged to write freely from their own particular vantage point.As part of the collective enterprise, they all attempt to describe the key issues, contributions, and controversies within their field and its engagements and interactions with the core social science and humanities disciplines.They also deal with their fields' relationships to the private foundations, US government agencies, national and international politics, generational changes, new domestic constituencies, and colleagues and institutions overseas.At the same time, coming from a wide range of disciplines and intellectual perspectives, they vary in their emphases.Read together, and comparatively, they should provide a reasonable sense of the heterogeneity, multiple trajectories, tensions, problems, and productivity of US area studies.clearly by the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of MA and PhD students specializing on the non-Western world were being trained in, and then hired to teach in, the core social science and humanities departments; anthropology, art history, geography, history, language and literature, music, sociology, political science, etc. 6 One result is that nearly all Area Studies faculty have at least double identities, e.g., as an historian and as a China scholar, as a sociologist but also as a Latin Americanist.Institutionally, this has meant that Area Studies departments have often shrunk and become increasingly marginalized and embattled.They continue to produce small numbers of MAs and PhDs, but provide many fewer employment opportunities in the university and beyond than internationally oriented degrees in the social science and humanities disciplines.As a result many Area Studies departments -the hope and key means for developing Area Studies in the 1940s and 1950s -were by the 1980s and 1990s, struggling to maintain their students and status within their universities.In contrast, Area Studies Centers, Institutes, and Programs have been institutionally far more successful.US universities now house hundreds of these units dealing with every region and all the major countries of the world.These Centers and Institutes may sponsor a few courses, but they do not usually grant degrees.However, they draw in and on faculty and graduate students from all across the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools by organizing or supporting multi-disciplinary lecture series, workshops, conferences, research and curriculum development projects, advanced language and topical courses, publication and library collection programs, and a wide variety of public outreach activities.By these various means, they often become active intellectual and programmatic focal points for both new and established scholars concerned with a particular area of the world.Despite this dramatic growth of area and other international studies in US colleges and universities debates continue on whether there is enough international and foreign language content in the curriculum; whether it is the right content; how it should be related to undergraduate majors or advanced deg